IHD 8390 

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1871a 
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HOPE. 
Drawn thus by Giotto in the Chapel of the Arena at Padua 



Foes Clavigeea 



LETTEES 

TO THE WORKMEN AND LABOURERS OF 
GREAT BRITAIN. 



By JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D 




NEW YORK: 
JOHN WILEY & SON, 

15 ASTOE, PLACE. 
1871. 

c 



*> 



?& 






FORS CLAVIGERA. 



LETTEE I. 



Denmakk Hill, 
Friends, lst January, 1871. 

"We begin to-day another group of ten years, not in 
happy circumstances. Although, for the time, exempted 
from the direct calamities which have fallen on neigh- 
bouring states, believe me, we have not escaped them 
because of our better deservings, nor by our better wisdom ; 
but only for one of two bad reasons, or for both : either 
that we have not sense enough to determine in a great 
national quarrel which side is right, or that we have not 
courage to defend the right, when we have discerned it. 

I believe that both these bad reasons exist in full force ; 
that our own political divisions prevent us from under- 
standing the laws of international justice ; and that, even 
if we did, we should not dare to defend, perhaps not even 
to assert them, being on this first of January, 1871, in 
much bodily fear ; that is to say, afraid of the Russians ; 
afraid of the Prussians ; afraid of the Americans ; afraid 

of the Hindoos ; afraid of the Chinese ; afraid of the 
1 



FOKS CLAVIGERA. 



Japanese ; afraid of the "New Zealanders ; and afraid of 
the Caffres : and very justly so, being conscious that our 
only real desire respecting any of these nations has been to 
get as much out of them as we could. 

They have no right to complain of us, notwithstanding, 
since w T e have all, lately, lived ourselves in the daily en- 
deavour to get as much out of our neighbours and friends 
as we could ; and having by this means, indeed, got a good 
deal out of each other, and put nothing into each other, 
the actually obtained result, this day, is a state of empti- 
ness in purse and stomach, for the solace of which our 
boasted " insular position " is ineffectual. 

I have listened to many ingenious persons, who say we 
are better off now than ever we were before. I do not know 
how well off we were before ; but I know positively that 
many very deserving persons of my acquaintance have great 
difficulty in living under these improved circumstances: 
also, that my desk is full of begging letters, eloquently 
written either by distressed or dishonest people ; and that 
we cannot be called, as a nation, well off, while so many of 
us are living either in honest or in villanous beggary. 

For my own part, I will put up with this state of things, 
passively, not an hour longer. I am not an unselfish per- 
son, nor an Evangelical one ; I have no particular pleasure 
in doing good ; neither do I dislike doing it so much as to 
expect to be rewarded for it in another world. But I sim- 
ply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do 
anything else that I like, and the very light of the morning 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 



sky, when there is any — which is seldom, now-a-days, near 
London — has become hateful to me, because of the misery 
that I know of, and see signs of, where I know it not, which 
no imagination can interpret too bitterly. 

Therefore, as I have said, I will endure it no longer 
quietly ; bnt henceforward, with any few or many who 
will help, do my poor best to abate this misery. But that 
I may do my best, I must not be miserable myself any 
longer ; for no man who is wretched in his own heart, and 
feeble in his own work, can rightly help others. 

Now my own special pleasure has lately been connected 
with a given duty. I have been ordered to endeavour to 
make our English youth care somewhat for the arts ; and 
must put my uttermost strength into that business. To 
which end I must clear myself from all sense of responsi- 
bility for the material distress around me, by explaining 
to you, once for all, in the shortest English I can, what I 
know of its causes ; by pointing out to you some of the 
methods by which it might be relieved ; and by setting 
aside regularly some small percentage of my income, to 
assist, as one of yourselves, in what one and all we shall 
have to do ; each of us laying by something, according to 
our means, for the common service ; and having amongst 
us, at last, be it ever so small, a national Store instead of a 
National Debt. Store which, once securely founded, will 
fast increase, provided only you take the pains to under- 
stand, and have perseverance to maintain, the elementary 
principles of Human Economy, which have, of late, not 



4. FOKS CLAVIGERA. 

only been lost sight of, but wilfully and formally entombed 
under pyramids of falsehood. 

And first I beg you most solemnly to convince your- 
selves of the partly comfortable, partly formidable fact, 
that your prosperity is in your own hands. That only in 
a remote degree does it depend on external matters, and 
least of all, on forms of Government. In all times of trou- 
ble the first thing to be done is to make the most of what- 
ever forms of government you have got, by setting honest 
men to work them ; (the trouble, in all probability, having 
arisen only from the want of such) ; and for the rest, you 
must in no wise concern yourselves about them: more 
particularly it would be lost time to do so at this moment, 
when whatever is popularly said about governments cannot 
but be absurd, for want of definition of terms. Consider, 
for instance, the ridiculousness of the division of parties 
into "Liberal" and "Conservative." There is no opposi- 
tion whatever between those two kinds of men. There is 
opposition between Liberals and Illiberals ; that is to say, 
between people who desire liberty, and who dislike it. I 
am a violent Illiberal ; but it does not follow that I must 
be a Conservative. A Conservative is a person who wishes 
to keep things as they are ; and he is opposed to a Des- 
tructive, who wishes to destroy them, or to an Innovator, 
who wishes to alter them. Now, though I am an Illiberal, 
there are many things I should like to destroy. I should 
like to destroy most of the railroads in England, and all 
the railroads in Wales. I should like to destroy and 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 5 

rebuild the Houses of Parliament, the National Gallery, 
and the East end of London; and to destroy, without 
rebuilding, the new town of Edinburgh, the north suburb 
of Geneva, and the city of ISTew York. Thus in many 
things I am the reverse of Conservative ; nay, there are 
some long-established things which I hope to see changed 
before I die ; but I want still to keep the fields of England 
green, and her cheeks red ; and that girls should be taught 
to curtsey, and boys to take their hats off, when a professor 
or otherwise dignified person passes by : and that kings 
should keep their crowns on their heads, and bishops their 
crosiers in their hands ; and should duly recognize the sig- 
nificance of the crown, and the use of the crook. 

As you would find it thus impossible to class me justly 
in either party, so you would find it impossible to class 
any person whatever, who had clear and developed political 
opinions, and who could define them accurately. Men 
only associate in parties by sacrificing their opinions, or by 
having none worth sacrificing; and the effect of party 
government is always to develop hostilities and hypocrisies, 
and to extinguish ideas. 

Thus the so-called Monarchic and Republican parties 
have thrown Europe into conflagration and sham^. merely 
for want of clear conception of the things they imagine 
themselves to fight for. The moment a Republic was pro- 
claimed in France, Garibaldi came to fight for it as a 
" Holy Republic." But Garibaldi could not know, — no 
mortal creature could know, — whether it was going to be 



6 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

a Holy or Profane Republic. You cannot evoke any form 
of government by beat of drum. The proclamation of a 
Government implies the considerate acceptance of a code 
of laws, and the appointment of means for their execution, 
neither of which things can be done in an instant. You 
may overthrow a government, and announce yourselves 
lawless, in the twinkling of an eye, as you can blow up a 
ship, or upset and sink one. But you can no more create 
a government with a word, than an iron-clad. 

No ; nor can you even define its character in few words ; 
the measure of sanctity in it depending on degrees of jus- 
tice in the administration of law, which are often inde- 
pendent of form altogether. Generally speaking, the 
community of thieves in London or Paris have adopted 
Republican Institutions, and live at this day without any 
acknowledged Captain or Head ; but under Robin Hood, 
brigandage in England, and under Sir John Hawkwood, 
brigandage in Italy, became strictly Monarchical. Theft 
could not, merely by that dignified form of government, 
be made a holy manner of life ; but it was made both 
dexterous and decorous. The pages of the English knights 
under Sir John Hawkwood spent nearly all their spare 
time in burnishing the knights' armour, and made it always 
so bright, that they were called " the White Company." 
And the Notary of Tortona, Azario, tells us of them, that 
those foragers (furatores^) " were more expert than any 
" plunderers in Lombardy. They for the most part sleep 
" by day, and watch by night, and have such plans and 



FOES CLAVTGERA. 7 

" artifices for taking towns, that never were the like or 
" equal of them witnessed." * 

The actual Prussian expedition into France merely 
differs from Sir John's in Italy by being more generally 
savage, much less enjoyable, and by its clumsier devices 
for taking towns ; for Sir John had no occasion to burn 
their libraries. In neither case does the monarchical form 
of government bestow any Divine right of theft ; but it 
puts the available forces into a convenient form. Even 
with respect to convenience only, it is not yet determinable 
by the evidence of history, what is absolutely the best 
form of government to live under. There are, indeed, 
said to be republican villages, (towns ?) in America, where 
everybody is civil, honest, and substantially comfortable ; 
but these villages have several unfair advantages — there 
are no lawyers in them, no town councils, and no parlia- 
ments. Such republicanism, if possible on a large scale, 
would be worth fighting for ; though, in my own private 
mind, I confess I should like to keep a few lawyers, for the 
sake of their wigs — and the faces under them — generally 
very grand when they are really good lawyers — and for 
their (unprofessional) talk. Also, I should like to have a 
Parliament, into which people might be elected on condi- 
tion of their never saying anything about politics, that 
one might still feel sometimes that one was acquainted 

* Communicated to me by my friend Mr. Rawdon Brown, of Venice, 
from his yet unpublished work '■The English in Italy in the 14th Cen 

tu ;v/.' 



8 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

with an M.P. In the meantime Parliament is a luxury to 
the British squire, and an honour to the British manufac- 
turer, which you may leave them to enjoy in their own 
way; provided only you make them always clearly ex- 
plain, when they tax you, what they want with your 
money ; and that you understand yourselves, what money 
is, and how it is got, and what it is good for, and bad for. 

These matters I hope to explain to you in this and some 
following letters ; which, among various other reasons, it 
is necessary that I should write in order that you may 
make no mistake as to the real economical results of Art 
teaching, whether in the Universities or elsewhere. I 
will begin by directing your attention particularly to that 
point. 

The first object of all work — not the principal one, but 
the first and necessary one — is to get food, clothes, lodg- 
ing, and fuel. 

It is quite possible to have too much of all these things. 
I know a great many gentlemen, who eat too large din- 
ners ; a great many ladies, who have too many clothes. 
I know there is lodging to spare in London, for I have 
several houses there myself, which I can't let. And I 
know there is fuel to spare everywhere, since we get up 
steam to pound the roads with, while our men stand idle ; 
or drink till they can't stand, idle, or any otherwise. 

Notwithstanding, there is agonizing distress even in this 
highly-favoured England, in some classes, for want of food, 
clothes, lodging, and fuel. And it has become a popular 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 9 

idea among the benevolent and ingenious, that you may in 
great part remedy these deficiencies by teaching, to these 
starving and shivering persons, Science and Art. In their 
way — as I do not doubt yon will believe — I am very fond 
of both ; and I am sure it will be beneficial for the British 
nation to be lectured upon the merits of Michael Angelo, 
and the nodes of the Moon. But I should strongly object 
myself to being lectured on either, while I was hungry and 
cold ; and I suppose the same view of the matter would 
be taken by the greater number of British citizens in those 
predicaments. So that, I am convinced, their present 
eagerness for instruction in painting and astronomy pro- 
ceeds from an impression in their minds that, somehow, 
they may paint or star-gaze themselves into clothes and 
victuals. Now it is perfectly true that you may sometimes 
sell a picture for a thousand pounds ; but the chances are 
greatly against your doing so — much more than the chances 
of a lottery. In the first place, you must paint a very 
clever picture ; and the chances are greatly against your 
doing that. In the second place, you must meet with an 
amiable picture-dealer; and the chances are somewhat 
against your doing that. In the third place, the amiable 
picture-dealer must meet with a fool ; and the chances are 
not always in favour even of his doing that — though, as I 
gave exactly the sum in question for a picture, myself, 
only the other day, it is not for me to say so. Assume, 
however, to put the case most favourably, that what with 

the practical results of the energies of Mr. Cole at Kensing- 
1* 



10 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

ton, and the aesthetic impressions produced by various lec- 
tures at Cambridge and Oxford, the profits of art employ- 
ment might be counted on as a rateable income. Suppose 
even that the ladies of the richer classes should come to 
delight no less in new pictures than in new dresses ; and 
that picture-making should thus become as constant and 
lucrative an occupation as dress-making. Still, you know, 
they can't buy pictures aud dresses too. If they buy two 
pictures a day, they can't buy two dresses a day ; or if 
they do, they must save in something else. They have 
but a certain income, be it never so large. They spend 
that, now ; and you can't get more out of them. Even if 
they lay by money, the time comes when somebody must 
spend it. You will find that they do verily spend now all 
they have, neither more nor less. If ever they seem to 
spend more, it is only by running in debt and not paying ; 
if they for a time spend less, some day the overplus must 
come into circulation. All they have, they spend ; more 
than that, they cannot at any time : less than that, they 
can only for a short time. 

Whenever, therefore, any new industry, such as this of 
picture-making, is invented, of which the profits depend 
on patronage, it merely means that you have effected a 
diversion of the current of money in your own favour, and 
to somebody else's loss. Nothing really has been gained 
by the nation, though probably much time and wit, as well 
as sundry people's senses, have been lost. Before such a 
diversion can be effected, a great many kind things must 



FOES CLAYIGEEA. 11 

have been done ; a great deal of excellent advice given ; 
and an immense quantity of ingenious trouble taken : the 
arithmetical course of the business throughout, being, that 
for every penny you are yourself better, somebody else is 
a penny the worse ; and the net result of the whole pre- 
cisely zero. 

Zero, of course, I mean, so far as money is concerned. 
It may be more dignified for working women to paint than 
to embroider ; and it may be a very charming piece of 
self-denial, in a young lady, to order a high art fresco in- 
stead of a ball-dress ; but as far as cakes and ale are con- 
cerned, it is all the same, — there is but so much money to 
be got by you, or spent by her, and not one farthing more, 
usually a great deal less, by high art, than by low. Zero, 
also, observe, I mean partly in a complimentary sense to 
the work executed. If you have done no good by paint- 
ing, at least you have done no serious mischief. A bad 
picture is indeed a dull thing to have in a house, and in a 
certain sense a mischievous thing ; but it won't blow the 
roof off. Whereas, of most things which the English, 
French, and Germans are paid for making now-a-days, — 
cartridges, cannon, and the like, — you know the best thing 
we can possibly hope is that they may be useless, and the 
net result of them, zero. 

The thing, therefore, that you have to ascertain, approx- 
imately, in order to determine on some consistent organi- 
zation, is the maximum of wages-fund you have to depend 
on to start with, that is to say, virtually, the sum of the 



12 FORS CLAVIGERA. 

income of the gentlemen of England. Do not trouble 
yourselves at first about France or Germany, or any other 
foreign country. The principle of Free-trade is, that 
French gentlemen should employ English workmen, for 
whatever the English can do better than the French ; and 
that English gentlemen should employ French workmen, 
for whatever the French can do better than the English. 
It is a very right principle, but merely extends the ques- 
tion to a wider field. Suppose, for the present, that France, 
and every other country but your own, were — what I sup- 
pose you would, if you had your way, like them to be — 
sunk under water, and that England were the only country 
in the world. Then, how would you live in it most com- 
fortably ? Find out that, and you will then easily find out 
how two countries can exist together ; or more, not only 
without need for fighting, but to each other's advantage. 

For, indeed, the laws by which two next-door neighbours 
might live most happily — the one not being the better 
for his neighbour's poverty, but the worse, and the better 
for his neighbour's prosperity — are those also by which 
it is convenient and wise for two parishes, two pro- 
vinces or two kingdoms to live side by side. And the 
nature of every commercial and military operation which 
takes place in Europe, or in the world, may always 
be best investigated by supposing it limited to the districts 
of a single country. Kent and Northumberland exchange 
hops and coals on precisely the same economical principles 
as Italy and England exchange oil for iron ; and the 



FOKS CLAVIGERA. 13 

essential character of the war between Germany and 
France may be best understood by supposing it a dispute 
between Lancashire and Yorkshire for the line of the 
Ribble. Suppose that Lancashire, haying absorbed Cum- 
berland and Cheshire, and been much insulted and trou- 
bled by Yorkshire in consequence, and at last attacked ; 
and having victoriously repulsed the attack, and retaining 
old grudges against Yorkshire, about the colour of roses, 
from the 15th century, declares that it cannot possibly be 
safe against the attacks of Yorkshire any longer, unless it 
gets the townships of Giggleswick and Wigglesworth, and 
a fortress on Pen-y-gent. Yorkshire replying that this is 
totally inadmissible, and that it will eat its last horse, and 
perish to its last Yorkshireman, rather than part with a 
stone of Giggleswick, a crag of Pen-y-gent, or a ripple of 
Ribble, — Lancashire with its Cumbrian and Cheshire con- 
tingents invades Yorkshire, and meeting with much Divine 
assistance, ravages the West Riding, and besieges York on 
Christmas Day. That is the actual gist of the whole busi- 
ness ; and in the same manner you may see the downright 
common-sense — if any is to be seen — of other human pro- 
ceedings, by taking them first under narrow and homely 
conditions. So for the present, we will fancy ourselves, 
what you tell me you all want to be, independent : we will 
take no account of any other country but Britain ; and on 
that condition I will begin to show you in my next paper 
how we ought to live, after ascertaining the utmost limits 
of the wages-fund, which means the income of our gentle- 



14 FOES CLAVTGEEA. 

men ; that is to say, essentially, the income of those who ; 
have command of the land, and therefore of all food. 

What you call " wages," practically, is the quantity of 
food which the possessor of the land gives you, to work 
for him. There is finally, no " capital " but that. If all 
the money of all the capitalists in the whole world were 
destroyed ; the notes and bills burnt, the gold irrecoverably 
buried, and all the machines and apparatus of manufac- 
tures crushed, by a mistake in signals, in one catastrophe ; 
and nothing remained but the land, with its animals and 
vegetables, and buildings for shelter, — the poorer popula- 
tion would be very little worse off than they are at this 
instant ; and their labour, instead of being " limited " by 
the destruction, would be greatly stimulated. They would 
feed themselves from the animals and growing crops; 
heap here and there a few tons of ironstone together, 
build rough walls round them to get a blast, and in a 
fortnight they would have iron tools again, and be plough- 
ing and fighting, just as usual. It is only we who had the 
capital who would suffer ; we should not be able to live 
idle, as we do now, and many of us — I, for instance — 
should starve at once : but you, though little the worse, 
would none of you be the better, eventually, for our loss 
— or starvation. The removal of superfluous mouths 
would indeed benefit you somewhat, for a time ; but you 
would soon replace them with hungrier ones ; and there 
are many of us who are quite worth our meat to you in 
different ways, which I will explain in due place : also I 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 15 

will show you that our money is really likely to be useful 
to you in its accumulated form, (besides that, in the in- 
stances when it has been won by work, it justly belongs 
to us), so only that you are careful never to let us persuade 
you into borrowing it, and paying us interest for it. You 
will find a very amusing story, explaining your position in 
that case, at the 117th page of the Manual of Political 
Economy, published this year at Cambridge, for your 
early instruction, in an almost devotionally catechetical 
form, by Messrs. Macmillan. 

Perhaps I had better quote it to you entire : it is taken 
by the author " from the French." 

There was once in a village a poor carpenter, who worked hard 
from morning to night. One day James thought to himself, " With 
my hatchet, saw, and hammer, I can only make coarse furniture, and 
can only get the pay for such. If I had a plane, I should please my 
customers more, and they would pay me more. Yes, I am resolved, 
I will make myself a plane." At the end of ten days, James had in 
his possession an admirable plane, which he valued all the more for 
having made it himself. Whilst he was reckoning all the profits 
which he expected to derive from the use of it, he was interrupted by 
William, a carpenter in the neighbouring village. William, having 
admired the plane, was struck with the advantages which might be 
gained from it. He said to James : — 

" You must do me a service ; lend me the plane for a year." As 
might be expected, James cried out, " How can you think of such a 
thing, William ? Well, if I do you this service, what will you do for 
me in return ? " 

W. Nothing. Don't you know that a loan ought to be gratui- 
tous ? 

J. I know nothing of the sort ; but I do know that if I were to 
lend you my plane for a year, it would be giving it to you. To tell 
you the truth, that was not what I made it for. 



16 FORS CLAVIGERA. 

W. Very well, then ; I ask you to do me a service ; what service 
do you ask me in return ? 

J. First, then, in a year the plane will be done for. You must 
therefore give me another exactly like it. 

W. That is perfectly just, I submit to these conditions. I think 
you must be satisfied with this, and can require nothing further. 

J. I think otherwise. I made the plane for myself, and not for 
you. I expected to gain some advantage from it. I have made the 
plane for the purpose of improving my work and my condition ; if 
you merely return it to me in a year, it is you who will gain the 
profit of it during the whole of that time. I am not bound to do 
you such a service without receiving anything in return. Therefore, 
if you wish for my plane, besides the restoration already bargained 
for, you must give me a new plank as a compensation for the advan- 
tages of which I shall be deprived. 

These terms were agreed to, but the singular part of it is that at 
the end of the year, when the plane came into James's possession, he 
lent it again ; recovered it, and lent it a third and fourth time. It 
has passed into the hands of his son, who still lends it. Let us ex- 
amine this little story. The plane is the symbol of all capital, and 
the plank is the symbol of all interest. 

If this be an abridgment, what a graceful piece of 
highly wrought literature the original story must be ! I 
take the liberty of abridging it a little more. 

James makes a plane, lends it to William on 1st Janu- 
ary for a year. William gives him a plank for the loan 
of it, wears it out, and makes another for James, which 
he gives him on 31st December. On 1st January he 
again borrows the new one; arid the arrangement is re- 
peated continuously. The position of William therefore 
is, that he makes a plane every 31st of December; lends 
it to James till the next day, and pays James a plank 
annually for the privilege of lending it to him on that 



FORS OLAVIGEEA. 17 

evening. This, in future investigations of capital and 
interest, we will call, if you please, " the position of 
William." 

You may not at the first glance see where the fallacy 
lies (the writer of this story evidently counts On your not 
seeing it at all). 

If James did not lend the plane to William, he could 
only get his gain of a plank by working with it himself, 
and wearing it out himself. When he had worn it out 
at the end of the year, he would, therefore, have to make 
another for himself. William, working with it instead, 
gets the advantage instead, which he must, therefore, pay 
James his plank for ; and return to James, what James 
would, if he had not lent his plane, then have had ; — not 
a new plane — but the worn-out one. James must make 
a new one for himself, as he would have had to do if no 
William had existed; and if William likes to borrow 
it again for another plank — all is fair. 

That is to say, clearing the story of its nonsense, that 
James makes a plane annually, and sells it to William 
for its proper price, which, in kind, is a new plank. But 
this arrangement has nothing whatever to do with princi- 
pal, or with interest. There are, indeed, many very subtle 
conditions involved in any sale; one among which is the 
value of ideas; I will explain that value to you in the 
course of time ; (the article is not one which modern poli- 
tical economists have any familiarity with dealings in) ; 
and I will tell you somewhat also of the real nature of in- 



18 FORS CLAVIGERA. 

terest; but if you will only get, for the present, a quite 
clear idea of "the Position of William," it is all I want 
of you. 

I remain, your faithful friend, 

JOHN KUSKIK 



My next letter, I hope, on 1st February. 



LETTEE n. 

Denmakk Hill, 

FltlENDS, 1st February, 1871. 

Befoee going farther, you may like to know, and 
ought to know, what I mean by the title of these Letters ; 
and why it is in Latin. I can only tell you in part, for 
the letters will be on many things, if I am able to carry 
out my plan in them ; and that title means many things, 
and is in Latin, because I could not have given an English 
one that meant so many. We, indeed, were not till lately 
a loquacious people, nor a useless one; but the Romans 
did more, and said less, than any other nation that ever 
lived; and their language is the most heroic ever spoken 
by men. 

Therefore I wish you to know, at least, some words of 
it, and to recognize what thoughts they stand for. 

Some day, I hope, you may know — and that European 
workmen may know — many words of it ; but even a few 
will be useful. 

Do not smile at my saying so. Of Arithmetic, Geo- 
metry, and Chemistry, you can know but little, at the 
utmost ; but that little, well learnt, serves you well. And 
a little Latin, well learnt, will serve you also, and in a 
higher way than any of these. 

" Fors " is the best part of three good English words, 



20 FOES CLAVIGEKA. 

Force, Fortitude, and Fortune. I wish you to know the 
meaning of those three words accurately. 

"Force," (in humanity), means power of doing good 
work. • A fool, or a corpse, can do any quantity of mis- 
chief; but only a wise and strong man, or, with what 
true vital force there is in him, a weak one, can do 
good. 

" Fortitude " means the power of bearing necessary pain, 
or trial of patience, whether by time, or temptation. 

" Fortune " means the necessary fate of a man : the 
ordinance of his life which cannot be changed. To "make 
your Fortune " is to rule that appointed fate to the best 
ends of which it is capable. 

Fors is a feminine word; and Clavigera is, therefore, 
the feminine of " Claviger." 

Clava means a club. Clavis, a key. Clavus, a nail, or 
a rudder. 

Gero means " I carry." It is the root of our word 
"gesture" (the way you carry yourself); and, in a curious 
bye-way, of "jest." 

Clavigera may mean, therefore, either Club-bearer, 
Key-bearer, or Nail-bearer. 

Each of these three possible meanings of Clavigera cor- 
responds to one of the three meanings of Fors. 

Fors, the Club-bearer, means the strength of Hercules, 
or of Deed. 

Fors, the Key-bearer, means the strength of Ulysses, or 
of Patience. 



FOES CLAVIOERA. 21 

Fors, the Nail-bearer, means the strength of Lycnrgus, 
or of Law. 

I will tell you what you may usefully know of those 
three Greek persons in a little time. At present, note only 
of the three powers : 1. That the strength of Hercules is 
for deed, not misdeed ; and that his club — the favourite 
weapon, also, of the Athenian hero Theseus, whose form 
is the best inheritance left to us by the greatest of Greek 
sculptors, (it is in the Elgin room of the British Museum, 
and I shall have much to tell you of him — especially how 
he helped Hercules in his utmost need, and how he in- 
vented mixed vegetable soup) — was for subduing monsters 
and cruel persons, and was of olive-wood. 2. That the 
Second Fors Clavigera is portress at a gate which she can- 
not open till you have waited long ; and that her robe is 
of the color of ashes, or dry earth. * 3. That the Third 
Fors Clavigera, the power of Lycurgus, is Royal as well 
as Legal; and that the notablest crown yet existing in 
Europe of any that have been worn by Christian kings, 
was — people say — made of a Nail. 

That is enough about my title, for this time ; now to 
our work. I told you, and you will find it true, that, 
practically, all wages mean the food and lodging given 
you by the possessors of the land. 

It begins to be asked on many sides how the possessors 
of the land became possessed of it, and why they should 

* See Carey's translation of the ninth book of Dante's Purgatory, 
line 105. 



22 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

still possess it, more than you or I: and Ricardo's 
"Theory" of Rent, though, for an economist, a very 
creditably ingenious work of fiction, will not much longer 
be imagined to explain the " Practice " of Rent. 

The true answer, in this matter, as in all others, is the 
best. Some land has been bought ; some, won by cultiva- 
tion : but the greater part, in Europe, seized originally by 
force of hand. 

You may think, in that case, you would be justified in 
trying to seize some yourselves, in the same Avay. 

If you could, you, and your children, would only hold 
it by the same title as its present holders. If it is a bad 
one, you had better not so hold it ; if a good one, you had 
better let the present holders alone. 

And in any case, it is expedient that you should do 
so, for the present holders, whom we may generally call 
" Squires," (a title having three meanings, like Fors, and 
all good ; namely, Rider, Shield-bearer, and Carver), are 
quite the best men you can now look to for leading : it 
is too true that they have much demoralized themselves 
lately by horse-racing, bird-shooting, and vermin-hunting ; 
and most of all by living in London, instead of on their 
estates ; but they are still without exception brave ; nearly 
without exception, good-natured; honest, so far as they 
understand honesty, and much to be depended on, if once 
you and they understand each other. 

Which you are far enough now from doing ; and it is 
imminently needful that you should : so we will have an 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 23 

accurate talk of them soon. The needfullest thing of all 
first is that you should know the functions of the persons 
whom you are being taught to think of as your protectors 
against the Squires ; — your "Employers," namely ; or Cap- 
italist Supporters of Labour. 

" Employers." It is a noble title. If, indeed, they 
have found you idle, and given you employment, wisely, — 
let us no more call them mere " Men " of Business, but 
rather " Angels " of Business : quite the best sort of 
Guardian Angel. 

Yet are you sure it is necessary, absolutely, to look to 
superior natures for employment ? Is it inconceivable 
that you should employ — yourselves ? I ask the question, 
because these Seraphic beings, undertaking also to be 
Seraphic Teachers or Doctors, have theories about em- 
ployment which may perhaps be true in their own celestial 
regions, but are inapplicable under worldly conditions. 

To one of these principles, announced by themselves as 
highly important, I must call your attention closely, be- 
cause it has of late been the cause of much embarrass- 
ment among persons in a sub-seraphic life. I take its 
statement verbatim, from the 25th page of the Cambridge 
catechism before quoted : 

"This brings us to a most important proposition respecting capi- 
tal, one which it is essential that the student should thoroughly un- 
derstand. 

" The proposition is this — A demand for commodities is not a de- 
mand for labour. 

" The demand for labour depends upon the amount of capital : 



24 FOES CLAVIGERA.. 

the demand for commodities simply determines in what direction 
labour shall be employed. 

"An example. — The truth of these assertions can best be shown 
by examples. Let us suppose that a manufacturer of woollen cloth 
is in the habit of spending 501. annually in lace. What does it mat- 
ter, say some, whether he spends this 50Z. in lace or whether he uses 
it to employ more labourers in his own business ? Does not the 501. 
spent in lace maintain the labourers who make the lace, just the same 
as it would maintain the labourers who make cloth, if the manufac- 
turer used the money in extending his own business ? If he ceased 
buying the lace, for the sake of employing more clothmakers, would 
there not be simply a transfer of the 501. from the lacemakers to the 
clothmakers ? In order to find the right answer to these questions 
let us imagine what would actually take place if the manufacturer 
ceased buying the lace, and employed the 50Z. in paying the wages 
of an additional number of clothmakers. The lace manufacturer, in 
consequence of the diminished demand for lace, would diminish the 
production, and would withdraw from his business an amount of 
capital corresponding to the diminished demand. As there is no 
reason to suppose that the lacemaker would, on losing some of his 
custom, become more extravagant, or would cease to desire to derive 
income from the capital which the diminished demand has caused 
him to withdraw from his own business, it may be assumed that he 
would invest this capital in some other industry. This capital is not 
the same as that which his former customer, the woollen cloth manu- 
facturer, is now paying his own labourers with ; it is a second capi- 
tal ; and in the place of 50Z. employed in maintaining labour, there 
is now 100Z. so employed. There is no transfer from lacemakers to 
clothmakers. There is fresh employment for the clothmakers and a 
transfer from the lacemakers to some other labourers. " — (Principles 
of Political Economy, vol. 1, p. 102.) 



This is very fine ; and it is clear that we may carry for- 
ward the improvement in onr commercial arrangements 
by recommending all the other customers of the lacemaker 
to treat him as the clothmaker has done. Whereupon he 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 25 

of course leaves the lace business entirely, and "uses 
all his capital in "some other industry." Having thus 
established the lacemaker with a complete " second cap- 
ital," in the other industry, we will next proceed to 
develope a capital out of the clothmaker, by recommend- 
ing all his customers to leave him. Whereupon, he will 
also invest his capital in " some other industry," and 
we have a Third capital, employed in the National 
benefit. 

¥e will now proceed in the round of all possible busi- 
nesses, developing a correspondent number of new capitals, 
till we come back to our friend the lacemaker again, and 
find him employed in whatever his new industry was. By 
now taking away again all his new customers, we begin 
the development of another order of Capitals in a higher 
Seraphic circle — and so develope at last an Infinite 
Capital ! 

It would be difficult to match this for simplicity ; it is 
more comic even than the fable of James and William, 
though you may find it less easy to detect the fallacy here ; 
but the obscurity is not because the error is less gross, but 
because it is threefold. Fallacy 1st is the assumption that 
a clothmaker may employ any number of men, whether he 
has customers or not ; while a lacemaker must dismiss his 
men if he has not customers. Fallacy 2nd. That when a 
lacemaker can no longer find customers for lace, he can 
always find customers for something else. Fallacy 3rd 

(the essential one). That the funds provided by these new 

2 



26 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

customers, produced seraphically from the clouds, are a 
" second capital." Those customers, if they exist now, 
existed before the lacemaker adopted his new busi- 
ness ; and were the employers of the people in that busi- 
ness. If the lacemaker gets them, he merely diverts 
their fifty pounds from the tradesmen they were before 
employing, to himself ; and that is Mr. Mill's " second 
capital." 

Underlying these three fallacies, however, there is, in 
the mind of " the greatest thinker of England," some 
consciousness of a partial truth, which he has never yet 
been able to define for himself — still less to explain to 
others. The real root of them is his conviction that it 
is beneficial and profitable to make broadcloth ; and 
unbeneficial and unprofitable to make lace ; * so that the 
trade of clothmaking should be infinitely extended, and 
that of lacemaking infinitely repressed. Which is, in- 
deed, partially true. Making cloth, if it be well made, 
is a good industry ; and if you had sense enough to read 
your Walter Scott thoroughly, I should invite you to join 
me in sincere hope that Glasgow might in that industry 
long flourish; and the chief hostelry at Aberfoil be at 
the sign of the " Nicol Jarvie." Also, of lacemakers, it 
is often true that they had better be doing something else. 

* I assume the Cambridge quotation to be correct : in my old edition, 
(1848), the distinction is between "weavers and lace-makers" and 
"journeymen bricklayers ; " and making- velvet is considered to be the 
production of a " commodity," but building a house only doing a " ser- 



FOES CLAVIGEKA. 27 

I admit it, with no good will, for I know a most kind lady, 
a clergyman's wife, who devotes her life to the benefit of 
her country by employing lacemakers ; and all her friends 
make presents of collars and cuffs to each other, for the 
sake of charity ; and as, if they did not, the poor girl- 
lacemakers would probably indeed be "diverted" into 
some other less diverting industry, in due assertion of 
the rights of women, (cartridge-filling, or percussion-cap 
making, most likely) I even go the length, sometimes, of 
furnishing my friend with a pattern, and never say a word 
to disturb her young customers in their conviction that it 
is an act of Christian charity to be married in more than 
ordinarily expensive veils. 

But there is one kind of lace for which I should be glad 
that the demand ceased. Iron lace. If we must even 
doubt whether ornamental thread-work may be, wisely, 
made on cushions in the sunshine, by dexterous fingers for 
fair shoulders, — how are we to think of Ornamental Iron- 
work, made with deadly sweat of men, and steady waste, 
all summer through, of the coals that Earth gave us for 
winter fuel ? What shall we say of labour spent on lace 
such as that % 

Kay, says the Cambridge Catechism, " the demand for 
commodities is not a demand for labour." 

Doubtless, in the economist's new earth, cast iron will 
be had for asking ; the hapless and brave Parisians find it 
even rain occasionally out of the new economical Heavens, 
without asking. Gold will also one day, perhaps, be be- 



28 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

gotten of gold, until the supply of that, as well as of iron, 
may be, at least, equal to the demand. But, in this world, 
it is not so yet. Neither thread-lace, gold-lace, iron-lace, 
nor stone-lace, whether they be commodities or incommodi- 
ties, can be had for notion g. How much, think you, did the 
gilded nourishes cost round the gas-lamps on Westminster 
Bridge ? or the stone-lace of the pinnacles of the temple 
of Parliament at the end of it, (incommodious enough, as 
I hear ;) or the point-lace of the park-railings which you 
so improperly pulled down, when you wanted to be Parlia- 
mentary yourselves ; (much good you would have got of 
that !) or the " openwork " of iron railings generally — the 
special glories of English design ? Will you couut the 
cost, in labour and coals, of the blank bars ranged along 
all the melancholy miles of our suburban streets, saying 
with their rusty tongues, as plainly as iron tongues can 
speak, " Thieves outside, and nothing to steal within." A 
beautiful wealth they are! and a productive capital! 
" Well but," you answer, " the making them was work 
for us." Of course it was; is not that the very thing 
I am telling you ! Work it was ; and too much. But 
will you be good enough to make up your minds, 
once for all, whether it is really work that you want, or 
rest? I thought you rather objected to your quantity 
of work ; — that you were all for having eight hours of 
it instead of ten? You may have twelve instead of 
ten easily. Sixteen, if you like ! if it is only occupation 
you want, why do you cast the iron ? Forge it in the 



FOES CLAVIGEKA. 29 

fresh air, on a workman's anvil ; make iron-lace like this 
of Yerona, — 




every link of it swinging loose like a knight's chain mail : 
then yon may have some joy of it afterwards, and pride ; 
and say yon knew the cnnning of a man's right hand. 
Bnt I think it is pay that yon want, not work ; and it is 
very true that pretty ironwork like that does not pay ; bnt 
it u pretty, and it might even be entertaining, if yon 
made those leaves at the top of it (which are, as far as I 
can see, only artichoke, and not very well done) in the 
likeness of all the beantiful leaves yon conld find, till yon 
knew them all by heart. " Wasted time and hammer- 
strokes," say yon % "A wise people like the English will 
have nothing bnt spikes; and besides, the spikes are 



30 FOES CLAVIGEEA. 

highly needful, so many of the wise people being thieves." 
Yes, that is so; and, therefore, in calculating the annual 
cost of keeping your thieves, you must always reckon, not 
only the cost of the spikes that keep them in, but of the 
spikes that keep them out. But how if, instead of flat 
rough spikes, you put triangular polished ones, commonly 
called bayonets; and instead of the perpendicular bars 
put perpendicular men 3 What is the cost to you then, of 
your railing, of which you must feed the idle bars daily ? 
Costly enough, if it stays quiet. But how, if it begin to 
march and countermarch ? and apply its spikes horizon- 
tally % 

And now note this that follows ; it is of vital import- 
ance to you. 

There are, practically, two absolutely opposite kinds of 
labour going on among men, for ever.* 

The first, labour supported by Capital, producing noth- 
ing. 

The second, labour unsupported by Capital, producing 
all things. 

Take two simple and precise instances on a small scale. 

A little while since I was paying a visit in Ireland, and 
chanced to hear an account of the pleasures of a picnic 

* I do not mean that there are no other kinds, nor that well-paid 
labour must necessarily be unproductive. I hope to see much done, some 
day, for just pay, and wholly productive. But these, named in the text, 
are the two opposite extremes ; and, in actual life hitherto, the largest 
means have been usually spent in mischief, and the most useful work 
done for the worst pay. 



FOES CLAVIGEKA. 31 

party, who had gone to see a waterfall. There was of 
course ample lunch, feasting on the grass, and basketsf ull 
of fragments taken up afterwards. 

Then the company, feeling themselves dull, gave the 
fragments that remained to the attendant ragged boys, on 
condition that they should " pull each other's hair." 

Here, you see, is, in the most accurate sense, employment 
of food, or capital, in the support of entirely unproductive 
labour. 

Next, for the second kind. I live at the top of a short 
but rather steep hill ; at the bottom of which, every day, 
all the year round, but especially in frost, coal-waggons 
get stranded, being economically provided with the small- 
est number of horses that can get them along on level 
ground. 

The other day, when the road, frozen after thaw, was at 
the worst, my assistant, the engraver of that bit of iron- 
work on the 29th page, was coming up here, and found 
three coal-waggons at a lock, helpless ; the drivers, as usual, 
explaining Political Economy to the horses, by beating 
them over the heads. 

There were half-a-dozen fellows besides, out of work, or 
not caring to be in it — standing by, looking on. My en- 
graver put his shoulder to a wheel (at least his hand to a 
spoke), and called on the idlers to do as much. They 
didn't seem to have thought of such a thing, but were 
ready enough when called on. " And we went up scream- 
ing," said Mr. Burgess. 



32 FOES CLAVIGEKA. 

Do you suppose that was one whit less proper human 
work than going up a hill against a battery, merely be- 
cause, in that case, half of the men would have gone down, 
screaming, instead of up ; and those who got up would 
have done no good at the top ? 

But observe the two opposite kinds of labour. The first, 
lavishly supported by Capital, and producing Nothing. 
The second, unsupported by any Capital whatsoever, — not 
having so much as a stick for a tool — but, called by 
mere goodwill, out of the vast void of the world's Idle- 
ness, and producing the definitely profitable result of 
moving a weight of fuel some distance towards the place 
where it was wanted, and sparing the strength of over- 
loaded creatures. 

Observe further. The labour producing no useful re 
suit was demoralizing. All such labour is. 

The labour producing useful result was educational in 
its influence on the temper. All such labour is. 

And the first condition of education, the thing you are 
all crying out for, is being put to wholesome and useful 
work. And it is nearly the last condition of it, too ; you 
need very little more ; but, as things go, there will yet be 
difficulty in getting that. As things have hitherto gone, 
the difficulty has been to avoid getting the reverse of that. 

For, during the last eight hundred years, the upper 
classes of Europe have been one large Picnic Party. Most 
of them have been religious also ; and in sitting down, by 
companies, upon the green grass, in parks, gardens, and 



FORS CLAVIGERA. 33 

the like, have considered themselves commanded into that 
position by Divine authority, and fed with bread from 
Heaven : of which they duly considered it proper to be- 
stow the fragments in support, and the tithes in tuition, of 
the poor. 

But, without even such small cost, they might have 
taught the poor many beneficial things. In some places, 
they have taught them manners, which is already much. 
They might have cheaply taught them merriment also :— 
dancing and singing, for instance. The young English 
ladies who sit nightly to be instructed, themselves, at some 
cost, in melodies illustrative of the consumption of La 
Traviata, and the damnation of Don Juan, might have 
taught every girl peasant in England to join in costless 
choirs of innocent song. Here and there, perhaps, a gen- 
tleman might have been found able to teach his peasantry 
some science and art. Science and fine art don't pay ; but 
they cost little. Tithes — not of the income of the country, 
but of the income, say, of its brewers — nay, probably the 
sum devoted annually by England to provide drugs for 
the adulteration of its own beer, — would have founded 
lovely little museums, and perfect libraries, in every vil- 
lage. And if here and there an English churchman had 
been found (such as Dean Stanley) willing to explain to 
peasants the sculpture of his and their own cathedral, and 
to read its black letter inscriptions for them; and, on 
warm Sundays, when they were too sleepy to attend to 

anything more proper — to tell them a story about some of 
3* 



34 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

the people who had built it, or lay buried in it — we per- 
haps might have been quite as religious as we are, and vet 
need not now have been offering prizes for competition in 
art schools, nor lecturing with tender sentiment on the 
inimitableness of the works of Fra Angelico. 

These things the great Picnic Party might have taught 
without cost, and with amusement to themselves. One 
thing, at least, they were bound to teach, whether it 
amused them or not ; — how, day by day, the daily bread 
they expected their village children to pray to God for, 
might be earned in accordance with the laws of God. 
This they might have taught, not only without cost, but 
with great gain. One thing only they Have taught, and 
at considerable cost. 

They have spent four hundred millions * of pounds here 
in England within the last twenty years ! — how much in 
France and Germany, I will take some pains to ascertain 
for you, — and with this initial outlay of capital, have 
taught the peasants of Europe — to pull each other's hair. 

With this result, 17th January, 1871, at and around the 
chief palace of their own pleasures, and the chief city of 
their delights : 

"Each demolished house has its own legend of sorrow, of pain, 
and horror ; each vacant doorway speaks to the eye, and almost to 

* £992,740,328, in seventeen years, say the working men of Burnley, 
in their address just issued — an excellent address in its way, and full of 
very fair arithmetic — if its facts are all right ; only I don't see, myself, 
how li from fifteen to twenty-five millions per annum," make nine hun- 
dred and ninety-two millions in seventeen years. 



FOES CLAVIGEKA. 35 

the ear, of hasty flight, as armies or fire came — of weeping women 
and trembling children running away in awful fear, abandoning the 
home that saw then birth, the old house they loved — of startled men 
seizing quickly under each arm their most valued goods, and rushing, 
heavily laden, after their wives and babes, leaving to hostile hands 
the task of burning all the rest. When evening falls, the wretched 
outcasts, worn with fatigue and tears, reach Versailles, St. Germain, 
or some other place outside the range of fire, and there they beg for 
bread and shelter, homeless, foodless, broken with despair. And 
this, remember, has been the fate of something like a hundred thou- 
sand people during the last four months. Versailles alone has about 
fifteen thousand such fugitives to keep alive, all ruined, all hopeless, 
all vaguely asking the grim future what still worse fate it may have 
in store for them." — Daily Telegraph, Jan. 17th, 1871. 

That is the result round their pleasant city, and this 
within their industrious and practical one : let us keep for 
the reference of future ages, a picture of domestic life, 
out of the streets of London in her commercial prosperity, 
founded on the eternal laws of Supply and Demand, as 
applied by the modern Capitalist : 

"A father in the last stage of consumption — two daughters nearly 
marriageable with hardly sufficient rotting clothing to ' cover their 
shame.' The rags that hang around their attenuated frames flutter 
in strips against their naked legs. They have no stool or chair upon 
which they can sit. Their father occupies the only stool in the room. 
They have no employment by which they can earn even a pittance. 
They are at home starving on a half-chance meal a day, and hiding 
their raggedness from the world. The walls are bare, there is one bed 
in the room, and a bundle of dirty rags are upon it. The dying 
father will shortly follow the dead mother, and when the parish coffin 
encloses his wasted form, and a pauper's grave closes above him, 
what shall be his daughters' lot ? This is but a type of many other 
homes in the district : dirt, misery, and disease alone flourish in that 
wretched neighbourhood. ' Fever and small-pox rage,' as the inhab- 



36 FOBS CLAVIGERA. 

itants say, ' next door, and next door, and over the way, and next 
door to that, and further down.' The living, dying, and dead are all 
huddled together. The houses have no ventilation, the back yards 
are receptacles for all sorts of filth and rubbish, the old barrels or 
vessels that contain the supply of water are thickly coated on the 
sides with slime, and there is an undisturbed deposit of mud at the 
bottom. There is no mortuary house — the dead lie in the dog-holes 
where they breathed their last, and add to the contagion which spreads 
through the neighbourhood." — Pall Mall Gazette, January 7th, 1871, 
quoting the Builder. 

As I was revising this sheet, — on the evening of the 
20th of last month, — two slips of paper were brought to 
me. One contained, in consecutive paragraphs, an extract 
from the speech of one of the best and kindest of our pub- 
lic men, to the " Liberal Association " at Portsmouth ; and 
an account of the performances of the 35-ton gun called 
the " Woolwich infant," which is fed with 700 pound shot, 
and 130 pounds of gunpowder at one mouthful ; not at 
all like the Wapping infants, starving on a half-chance 
meal a day. " The gun was fired with the most satisfac- 
tory result," nobody being hurt, and nothing damaged but 
the platform, while the shot passed through the screens in 
front at the rate of 1,303 feet per second : and it seems, 
also, that the Woolwich infant has not seen the light too 
soon. For Mr. Cowper-Temple, in the preceding para- 
graph, informs the Liberals of Portsmouth, that in conse- 
quence of our amiable neutrality, " we must contemplate 
the contingency of a combined fleet coming from the ports 
of Prussia, Russia, and America, and making an attack 
on England." 



FORS CLAVIOERA. 37 

Contemplating myself these relations of Russia, Prussia, 
Woolwich, and Wapping, it seems to my uncommercial 
mind merely like another case of iron railings — thieves 
outside, and nothing to steal within. But the second slip 
of paper announced approaching help in a peaceful direc- 
tion. It was the prospectus of the Boardmen's and Gen- 
eral Advertising Co-operative Society, which invites, from 
the "generosity of the public, a necessary small pre- 
liminary sum," and, " in addition to the above, a small 
sum of money by way of capital," to set the members of 
the society up in the profitable business of walking about 
London between two boards. Here is at last found for us, 
then, it appears, a line of life ! At the West End, loung- 
ing about the streets, with a well-made back to one's coat, 
and front to one's shirt, is usually thought of as not much 
in the way of business ; but, doubtless, to lounge at the 
East End about the streets, with one Lie pinned to the 
front of you, and another to the back of you, will pay, in 
time, only with proper preliminary expenditure of capital. 
My friends, I repeat my question : Do you not think you 
could contrive some little method of employing — your- 
selves % for truly I think the Seraphic Doctors are nearly 
at their wits' end (if ever their wits had a beginning). 
Tradesmen are beginning to find it difficult to live by lies 
of their own; and workmen will not find it much easier to 
live, by walking about, flattened between other people's. 

Think over it. On the first of March, I hope to ask you 
to read a little history with me ; perhaps, also, because the 



38 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

world's time, seen truly, is but one long and fitful April, 
in which every day is All Fools' day, — we may continue 
our studies in that month ; but on the first of May, you 
shall consider with me what you can do, or let me, if still 
living, tell you what I know you can do — those of you, at 
least, who will promise — (with the help of the three strong. 
Fates), these three things : 

1. To do your own work well, whether it be for life or 
death. 

2. To help other people at theirs, when you can, and 
seek to avenge no injury. 

3. To be sure you can obey good laws before you seek 
to alter bad ones. 

Believe me, 

Your faithful friend, 

JOHN KUSKIK 



LETTEE HI. 

My Friends, 1«* March, 1871. 

We are to read — with your leave — some history to- 
day; the leave, however, will perhaps not willingly be 
given, for you may think that of late you have read 
enough history, or too much, in Gazettes of morning and 
evening. !N~o ; you have read, and can read, no history in 
these. Reports of daily events, yes ; — and if any journal 
would limit itself to statements of well-sifted fact, making 
itself not a " news "paper, but an " olds "paper, and giving 
its statements tested and true, like old wine, as soon as 
things could be known accurately ; choosing also, of the 
many things that might be known, those which it was 
most vital to know, and summing them in few words of 
pure English, — I cannot say whether it would ever pay 
well to sell it ; but I am sure it would pay well to read it, 
and to read no other. 

But even so, to know only what was happening day by 
day, would not be to read history. What happens now is 
but the momentary scene of a great play, of which you 
can understand nothing without some knowledge of the 
former action. And of that, so great a play is it, you can 
at best understand little ; yet of history, as of science, a 



4:0 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

little, well known, will serve you much, and a little, ill 
known, will do yon fatally the contrary of service. 

For instance, all your journals will be full of talk, for 
months to come, about whose fault the war was ; and you 
yourselves, as you begin to feel its deadly recoil on your 
own interests, or as you comprehend better the misery it 
has brought on others, will be looking about more and 
more restlessly for some one to accuse of it. That is be- 
cause you don't know the law of Fate, nor the course of 
history. It is the law of Fate that we shall live, in part, 
by our own efforts, but in the greater part, by the help of 
others ; and that we shall also die, in part, for our own 
faults ; but in the greater part, for the faults of others. 
Do you suppose (to take the thing on the small scale in 
which you can test it) that those seven children torn into 
pieces out of their sleep, in the last night of the siege of 
Paris,* had sinned above all the children in Paris, or 
above yours ? or that their parents had sinned more than 
you ? Do you think the thousands of soldiers, German 
and French, who have died in agony, and of women who 
have died of grief, had sinned above all other soldiers, or 
mothers, or girls, there and here ? 

It was not their fault, but their Fate. The thing ap- 
pointed to them by the Third Fors. But you think it was 
at least the Emperor Napoleon's fault, if not theirs ? Or 
Count Bismarck's ? No ; not at all. The Emperor Napo- 
leon had no more to do with it than a cork on the top of a 
* Daily Telegraph, 30th January, 1871. 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 41 

wave has with the toss of the sea. Count Bismarck had 
very little to do with it. When the Count sent for my 
waiter, last July, in the village of Lauterbrunnen, among 
the Alps, — that the waiter then aud there packed his knap- 
sack and departed, to be shot, if need were, leaving my 
dinner unserved (as has been the case with many other 
people's dinners since) — depended on things much anterior 
to Count Bismarck. The two men who had most to answer 
for in the mischief of the matter were St. Louis and his 
brother, who lived in the middle of the thirteenth century. 
One, among the very best of men ; and the other, of all 
that I ever read of, the worst. The good man, living in 
mistaken effort, and dying miserably, to the ruin of his 
country ; the bad man living in triumphant good fortune, 
and dying peaceably, to the ruin of many countries. Such 
were their Fates, and ours. I am not going to tell you of 
them, nor anything about the French war to-day ; and you 
have been told, long ago, (only you would not listen, nor 
believe,) the root of the modern German power — in that 
rough father of Frederick, who " yearly made his country 
richer, and this not in money alone (which is of very un- 
certain value, and sometimes has no value at all, and even 
less), but in frugality, diligence, punctuality, veracity, — 
the grand fountains from which money, and all real values 
and valours, spring for men. As a Nation's Husband, 
he seeks his fellow among Kings, ancient and modern. 
Happy the nation whic h gets such a Husband, once in the 
half thousand years. The Nation, as foolish wives and 



42 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

Nations do, repines and grudges a good deal, its weak 
whims and will being thwarted very often; but it ad- 
vances steadily, with consciousness or not, in the way of 
well-doing ; and, after long times, the harvest of this dili- 
gent sowing becomes manifest to the Nation, and to all 
Nations." * 

No such harvest is sowing for you, — Freemen and Inde- 
pendent Electors of Parliamentary representatives, as you 
think yourselves. 

Freemen, indeed ! You are slaves, not to masters of 
any strength or honour ; but to the idlest talkers at that 
floral end of Westminster bridge. Nay, to countless 
meaner masters than they. For though, indeed, as early 
as the year 1102, it was decreed in a council at St. Peter's, 
Westminster, " that no man for the future should presume 
to carry on the wicked trade of selling men in the markets, 
like brute beasts, which hitherto hath been the common 
custom of England," the no less wicked trade of under- 
setting men in markets has lasted to this day ; producing 
conditions of slavery differing from the ancient ones only 
in being starved instead of full-fed : and besides this, a 
state of slavery unheard of among the nations till now, 
has arisen with us. In all former slaveries, Egyptian, 
Algerine, Saxon, and American, the slave's complaint has 
been of compulsory work. But the modern Politico-Eco- 
nomic slave is a new and far more injured species, con- 
demned to Compulsory Idleness, for fear he should spoil 
* Carlyle's Frederick, Book IV., chap. iii. 



FOES CLAVIGEKA. 43 

other people's trade; -the beautifully logical condition of 
the national Theory of Economy in this matter being that, 
if you are a shoemaker, it is a law of Heaven that you 
must sell your goods under their price, in order to destroy 
the trade of other shoemakers ; but if you are not a shoe- 
maker, and are going shoeless and lame, it is a law of 
Heaven that you must not cut yourself a bit of cowhide, to 
put between your foot and the stones, because that would 
interfere with the total trade of shoemaking. 

Which theory, of all the wonderful — ! 

■k- * # * *• 

We will wait till April to consider of it ; meantime, 
here is a note I have received from Mr. Alsager A. Hill, 
who having been unfortunately active in organizing that 
new effort in the advertising business, designed, as it seems, 
on this loveliest principle of doing nothing that will be 
perilously productive — was hurt by my manner of mention 
of it in the last number of Fors. I offered accordingly 
to print any form of remonstrance he would furnish me 
with, if laconic enough ; and he writes to me, " The inten- 
tion of the Boardmen's Society is not, as the writer of 
Fors Clavigera suggests, to ' find a line of life ' for able- 
bodied labourers, but simply, by means of co-operation, to 
give them the fullest benefit of their labour whilst they con- 
tinue a very humble but still remunerative calling. See 
Rule 12. The capital asked for to start the organization 
is essential in all industrial partnerships, and in so poor a 
class of labour as that of street board-carrying could not 



44 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

be supplied by the men themselves. With respect to the 
' lies ' alleged to be carried in front and behind, it is rather 
hard measure to say that mere announcements of public 
meetings or places of entertainments (of which street no- 
tices chiefly consist) are necessarily falsehoods." 

To which, I have only to reply that I never said the 
newly-found line of life was meant for able-bodied per- 
sons. The distinction between able and unable-bodied 
men is entirely indefinite. There are all degrees of abil- 
ity for all things ; and a man who can do anything, how- 
ever little, should be made to do that little usefully. If 
you can carry about a board with a bill on it, you can carry, 
not about, but where it is wanted, a board without a bill 
on it ; which is a much more useful exercise of your ina- 
bility. Respecting the general probity, and historical . or 
descriptive accuracy, of advertisements, and their func- 
tion in modern economy, I will inquire in another place. 
You see I use none for this book, and shall in future use 
none for any of my books ; having grave objection even 
to the very small minority of advertisements which are 
approximately true. I am correcting this sheet in the 
"Crown and Thistle" inn at Abingdon, and under my 
window is a shrill-voiced person, slowly progressive, crying 
" Soles, three pair for a shillin'." In a market regulated 
by reason and order, instead of demand and supply, the 
soles would neither have been kept long enough to render 
such advertisement of them necessary, nor permitted, after 
their inexpedient preservation, to be advertised. 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 45 

Of all attainable liberties, then, be sure first to strive 
for leave to be useful. Independence you had better 
cease to talk of, for you are dependent not only on every 
act of people whom you never heard of, who are living 
round you, but on every past act of what has been dust 
for a thousand years. So also, does the course of a thou- 
sand years to come, depend upon the little perishing 
strength that is in you. 

Little enough, and perishing, often without reward, 
however well spent. Understand that. Yirtue does not 
consist in doing what will be presently paid, or even paid 
at all, to you, the virtuous person. It may so chance ; or 
may not. It will be paid, some day ; but the vital condi- 
tion of it, as virtue, is that it shall be content in its own 
deed, and desirous rather that the pay of it, if any, should 
be for others ; just as it is also the vital condition of vice 
to be content in its own deed, and desirous that the pay 
thereof, if any, should be to others. 

You have probably heard of St. Louis before now: and 
perhaps also that he built the Sainte Chapel] e of Paris, of 
which you may have seen that I wrote the other day to the 
Telegraph, as being the most precious piece of Gothic in 
Northern Europe ; but you are not likely to have known 
that the spire of it was Tenter den steeple over again, and 
the cause of fatal sands many, quick, and slow, and above 
all, of the running of these in the last hour-glass of France ; 
for that spire, and others like it, subordinate, have acted 
ever since as lightning-rods, in a reverse manner ; carry- 



46 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

ing, not the fire of heaven innocently to earth, but electric 
fire of earth innocently to heaven, leaving ns all, down 
here, cold. The best virtue and heart-fire of France (not 
to say of England, who building her towers for the most 
part with four pinnacles instead of one, in a somewhat 
quadrumanous type, finds them less apt as conductors), 
have spent themselves for these past six centuries in run- 
ning up those steeples and off them, nobody knows where, 
leaving a " holy Republic " as residue at the bottom ; help- 
less, clay-cold, and croaking, a habitation of frogs, which 
poor Garibaldi fights for, vainly raging against the ghost 
of St. Louis. 

It is of English ghosts, however, that I would fain tell 
you somewhat to-day ; of them, and of the land they 
haunt, and know still for theirs. For hear this to begin 
with : — 

" While a map of France or Germany in the eleventh 
century is useless for modern purposes, and looks like the 
picture of another region, a map of England proper in 
the reign of Victoria hardly differs at all from a map of 
England proper in the reign of "William " (the Conqueror). 
So says, very truly, Mr. Freeman in his History of the 
Conquest. Are there any of you who care for this old 
England, of which the map has remained unchanged for 
so long ? I believe you would care more for her, and less 
for yourselves, except as her faithful children, if you 
knew a little more about her; and especially more of 
what she has been. The difficulty, indeed, at any time, 



FOKS CLAVIGEKA. 4.7 

is in finding out what she has been ; for that which peo- 
ple usually call her history is not hers at all ; but that of 
her Kings, or the tax-gatherers employed by them, which 
is as if people were to call Mr. Gladstone's history, or Mr. 
Lowe's, yours and mine. 

But the history even of her Kings is worth reading. 
You remember, I said, that sometimes in church it might 
keep you awake to be told a little of it. For a simple in- 
stance, you have heard probably of Absalom's rebellion 
against his father, and of David's agony at his death, until 
from very weariness you have ceased to feel the power of 
the story. Tou would not feel it less vividly if you knew 
that a far more fearful sorrow, of the like kind, had hap- 
pened to one of your own Kings, perhaps the best we 
have had, take him for all in all. Not one only, but three 
of his sons, rebelled against him, and were urged into 
rebellion by their mother. The Prince, who should have 
been King after him, was pardoned, not once, but many 
times — pardoned wholly, with rejoicing over him as over 
the dead alive, and set at his father's right hand in the 
kingdom ; but all in vain. Hard and treacherous to the 
heart's core, nothing wins him, nothing warns, nothing 
binds. He flies to France, and wars at last alike against 
father and brother, till, falling sick through mingled guilt, 
and shame, and rage, he repents idly as the fever-fire 
withers him. His father sends him the signet ring from 
his finger in token of one more forgiveness. The Prince 
lies down on a heap of ashes with a halter round his neck, 



48 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

and so dies. When his father heard it he fainted away 
three times, and then broke ont into bitterest crying and 
tears. This, you would have thought enough for the Third 
dark Fate to have appointed for a man's sorrows. It was 
little to that which was to come. His second son, who 
was now his Prince of England, conspired against him, 
and pursued his father from city to city, in Norman 
France. At last, even his youngest son, best beloved of 
all, abandoned him, and went over to his enemies. 

This was enough. Between him and his children 
Heaven commanded its own peace. He sickened and 
died of grief on the 6th of July, 1189. 

The son who had killed him, " repented " now ; but 
there could be no signet ring sent to him. Perhaps the 
dead do not forgive. Men say, as he stood by his father's 
corpse, that the blood burst from its nostrils. One child 
only had been faithful to him, but he was the son of a 
girl whom he had loved much, and as he should not ; his 
Queen, therefore, being a much older person, and strict 
upon proprieties, poisoned her; nevertheless poor Rosa- 
mond's son never failed him ; won a battle for him in 
England, which, in all human probability, saved his king- 
dom ; and was made a bishop, and turned out a bishop of 
the best. 

You know already a little about the Prince who stood 
unforgiven (as it seemed) by his father's body. He, also, 
had to forgive, in his time ; but only a stranger's arrow 
shot — not those reversed " arrows in the hand of the giant," 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 4 ( J 

by which his father died. Men called him " Lion-heart," 
not untruly ; and the English, as a people, have prided 
themselves somewhat ever since on having, every man of 
them, the heart of a lion ; without inquiring particularly 
either what sort of heart a lion has, or whether to have the 
heart of a lamb might not sometimes be more to the pur- 
pose. But it so happens that the name was very justly 
given to this prince ; and I want you to study his charac- 
ter somewhat, with me, because in all our history there is 
no truer representative of one great species of the British 
squire, under all the three significances of the name ; for 
this Richard of ours was beyond most of his fellows, a 
Rider and a Shieldbearer ; and beyond all meu of his day, 
a Carver ; and in disposition and un reasonable exercise of 
intellectual power, typically a Squire altogether. 

Note of him first, then, that he verily desired the good 
of his people (provided it could be contrived without any 
check of his own humour), and that he saw his way to it 
a great deal clearer than any of your squires do now. 
Here are some of his laws for you : — 

"Having set forth the great inconveniences arising 

from the diversity of weights and measures in different 

parts of the kingdom, he, by a law, commanded all 

measures of corn, and other dry goods, as also of liquors, 

to be exactly the same in all his dominions ; and that the 

rim of each of these measures should be a circle of iron. 

By another law, he commanded all cloth to be woven two 

yards in breadth within the lists, and of equal goodness 
3 



50 FOBS CLAVIGERA. 

in all parts ; and that all cloth which did not answer this 
description should be seized and burnt. He enacted, 
further, that all the coin of the kingdom should be ex- 
actly of the same weight and fineness ; — that no Christian 
should take any interest for money lent; and, to prevenc 
the extortions of the Jews, he commanded that all com- 
pacts between Christians and Jews should be made in the 
presence of witnesses, and the conditions of them put 
in writing." So, you see, in Cceur-de-Lion's day, it was 
not esteemed of absolute necessity to put agreements 
between Christians in writing ! Which if it were not 
now, you know we might save a great deal of money, 
and discharge some of our workmen round Temple Bar, 
as well as from Woolwich Dockyards. Note also that 
bit about interest of money also for future reference. 
In the next place observe that this King had great 
objection to thieves — at least to any person whom he 
clearly comprehended to be a thief. He was the inventor 
of a mode of treatment which I believe the Americans — 
among whom it has not fallen altogether into disuse — 
do not gratefully enough recognize as a Monarchical insti- 
tution. By the last of the laws for the government of his 
fleet in his expedition to Palestine, it is decreed, — " That 
whoever is convicted of theft shall have his head shaved, 
melted pitch poured upon it, and the feathers from a 
pillow shaken over it, that he may be known ; and shall 
be put on shore on the first land which the ship touches." 
And not only so; he even objected to any theft by misre- 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 51 

presentation or deception, — for being evidently particularly 
interested, like Mr. Mill, in that cloth manufacture, and 
having made the above law about the breadth of the web, 
which has caused it to be spoken of ever since as " Broad 
Cloth," and besides, for better preservation of its breadth, 
enacted that the Ell shall be of the same length all over 
the kingdom, and that it shall be made of iron — (so that 
Mr. Tennyson's provision for National defences — that every 
shop-boy should strike with his cheating yard-wand home, 
would be mended much by the substitution of King 
Richard's honest ell-wand, and for once with advisable 
encouragement to the iron trade) — King Richard finally 
declares — " That it shall be of the same goodness in the 
middle as at the sides, and that no merchant in any part 
of the kingdom of England shall stretch before his shop 
or booth a red or black cloth, or any other thing by which 
the sight of buyers is frequently deceived in the choice of 
good cloth." 

These being Richard's rough and unreasonable, chanc- 
ing nevertheless, being wholly honest, to be wholly right, 
notions of business, the next point you are to note in him 
is his unreasonable good humour ; an eminent character of 
English Squires ; a very loveable one ; and available to 
himself and others in many ways, but not altogether so 
exemplary as many think it. If you are unscrupulously 
resolved, whenever you can get your own way, to take it ; 
if you are in a position of life wherein you can get a good 
deal of it, and if you have pugnacity enough to enjoy 



52 FORS CLAVIGERA. 

fighting with anybody who will not give it you, there is 
little reason why you should ever be out of humour, un- 
less indeed your way is a broad one, wherein you are like 
to be opposed in force. Richard's way was a very narrow 
one. To be first in battle, (generally obtaining that main 
piece of his will without question ; once only worsted, by 
a French knight, and then, not at all good-humouredly), to 
be first in recognized command — therefore contending 
with his father, who was both in wisdom and acknowl- 
edged place superior; but scarcely contending at all with 
his brother John, who was as definitely and deeply be- 
neath him; good-humoured unreasonably, while he was 
killing his father, the best of kings, and letting his brother 
rule unresisted, who was among the worst; and only pro- 
posing for his object in life to enjoy himself everywhere 
in a chivalrous, poetical, and pleasantly animal manner, 
as a strong man always may. What should he have been 
out of humour for? That he brightly and bravely lived 
through his captivity is much indeed to his honour ; but 
it was his point of honour to be bright and brave; not at 
all to take care of his kingdom. A king who cared for 
that, would have got thinner and sadder in prison. 

And it remains true of the English squire to this day, 
that, for the most part, he thinks that his kingdom is given 
him that he may be bright and brave; and not at all 
that the sunshine or valour in him is meant to be of use 
to his kingdom. 

But the next point you have to note in Richard is in- 



FORS CLAVIGEEA. 53 

deed a very noble quality, and true English ; he always 
does as much of his work as he can with his own hands. 
He was not in any wise a king who would sit by a wind- 
mill to watch his son and his men at work, though brave 
kings have done so. As much as might be, of whatever 
had to be done, he would stedfastly do from his own 
shoulder ; his main tool being an old Greek one, and the 
working God Yulcan's — the clearing axe. When that was 
no longer needful, and nothing would serve but spade and 
trowel, still the king was foremost ; and after the weary 
retreat to Ascalon, when he f ound the place " so complete- 
ly ruined and deserted, that it afforded neither food, 
lodging, nor protection," nor any other sort of capital, — 
forthwith, 20th January, 1192 — his army and he set to 
work to repair it; a three months' business, of inces- 
sant toil, "from which the king himself was not exempt- 
ed, but wrought with greater ardour than any common 
labourer." 

The next point of his character is very English also, but 
less honourably so. I said but now that he had a great 
objection to anybody whom he clearly comprehended to 
be a thief. But he had great difficulty in reaching any- 
thing like an abstract definition of thieving, such as would 
include every method of it, and every culprit, which is 
an incapacity very common to many of us to this day. 
For instance, he carried off a great deal of treasure which 
belonged to his father, from Chinon (the royal treasury- 
town in France), and fortified his own castles in Poitou 



54 FORS CLAVIGERA. 

with it ; and when he wanted money to go crusading 
with, sold the royal castles, manors, woods, and forests, 
and even the superiority of the Crown of England over 
the kingdom of Scotland, which his father had wrought 
hard for, for about a hundred thousand pounds. ISTay, the 
highest honours and most important offices become venal 
under him; and from a Princess's dowry to a Saracen 
caravan, nothing comes much amiss : not but that he gives 
generously also ; whole ships at a time when he is in the 
humour; but his main practice is getting and spending, 
never saving; which covetousness is at last the death of 
him. For hearing that a considerable treasure of ancient 
coins and medals has been found in the lands of Yidomar, 
Viscount of Limoges, King Richard sends forthwith to 
claim this waif for himself. The Yiscount offers him 
part only, presumably having an antiquarian turn of mind. 
Whereupon Richard loses his temper, and marches forth- 
with with some Brabant men, mercenaries, to besiege the 
Yiscount in his castle of Chalus ; proposing, first, to possess 
himself of the antique and otherwise interesting coin in 
the castle, and then, on his general principle of objection 
to thieves, to hang the garrison. The garrison, on this, 
offer to give up the antiquities if they may march off 
themselves; but Richard declares that nothing will serve 
but they must all be hanged. Whereon the siege pro- 
ceeding by rule, and Richard looking, as usual, into mat- 
ters with his own eyes, and going too near the walls, an 
arrow well meant, though half spent, pierces the strong 



FORS CLAVTGERA. 55 

white shoulder ; the shield-bearing one, carelessly forward 
above instead of under shield ; or perhaps, rather, when he 
was afoot, shieldless, engineering. He finishes his work, 
however, though the scratch teases him; plans his assault, 
carries his castle, and duly hangs his garrison, all but the 
archer, whom in his royal unreasoning way he thinks bet- 
ter of, for the well-spent arrow. But he pulls it out im- 
patiently, and the head of it stays in the fair flesh ; a little 
surgery follows; not so skilful as the archery of those 
days, and the lion heart is appeased — 

Sixth April, 1199. 

We will pursue our historical studies, if you please, in 
that month of the present year. But I wish, in the mean- 
time, you would observe, and meditate on, the quite 
Anglican character of Richard, to his death. 

It might have been remarked to him, on his projecting 
the expedition to Chalus, that there were not a few Bo- 
man coins, and other antiquities, to be found in his own 
kingdom of England, without fighting for them, by mere 
spade-labour and other innocuous means; — that even 
the brightest new money was obtainable from his loyal 
people in almost any quantity for civil asking, and 
that the same loyal people, encouraged and protected, 
and above all, kept clean-handed, in the arts, by their 
king, might produce treasures more covetable than any 
antiquities. 

" No ; " Bichard would have answered, — " that is all 
hypothetical and visionary ; here is a pot of coin presently 



56 FOKS CLAVIGERA. 

to be had — no doubt about it — inside the walls here : - 
let me once get hold of that, and then," — 

•Jfr * * •* # 

That is what we English call being " Practical." 
Believe me, 

Faithfully yours, 

JOHN EUSKIN. 



LETTER IY. 

Denmakk Hill, 
My Friends, Is* April, 1871. 

It cannot but be pleasing to us to reflect, this day, 

that if we are often foolish enough to talk English without 

understanding it, we are often wise enough to talk Latin 

without knowing it. For this month retains its pretty 

.Roman name, and means the month of Opening ; of the 

light in the days, and the life in the leaves, and of the 

voices of birds, and of the hearts of men. 

And being the month of Manifestation, it is pre-emi- 
nently the month of Fools ; — for under the beatific influ- 
ences of moral sunshine, or Education, the Fools always 
come out first. 

But what is less pleasing to reflect upon, this spring 
morning, is, that there are some kinds of education which 
may be described, not as moral sunshine, but as moral 
moonshine ; and that, under these, Fools come out both 
First — and Last. 

We have, it seems, now set our opening hearts much on 
this one point, that we will have education for all men and 
women now, and for all boys and girls that are to be. Noth- 
ing, indeed, can be more desirable, if only we determine 
also what kind of education we are to have. It is taken for 

granted that any education must be good ; — that the more 
3* 



58 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

of it we get, the better ; that bad education only means 
little education ; and that the worst thing we have to fear 
is getting none. Alas, that is not at all so. Getting no 
education is by no means the worst thing that can happen 
to us. One of the pleasantest friends I ever had in my 
life was a Savoyard guide, who could only read with diffi- 
culty, and write, scarcely intelligibly, and by great effort. 
Tie knew no language but his own — no science, except as 
much practical agriculture as served him to till his fields. 
But he was, without exception, one of the happiest per- 
sons, and, on the whole, one of the best, I have ever 
known ; and after lunch, when he had had his half bottle 
of Savoy wine, he would generally, as we walked up some 
quiet valley in the afternoon light, give me a little lecture 
on philosophy ; and after I had fatigued and provoked 
him with less cheerful views of the world than his own, he 
would fall back to my servant behind me, and console 
himself with a shrug of the shoulders, and a whispered 
" Le pauvre enfant, il ne sait pas vivre ! " — (" The poor 
child, he doesn't know how to live.") 

No, my friends, believe me, it is not the going without 
education at all that we have most to dread. The real 
thing to be feared is getting a bad one. There are all 
sorts — good, and very good; bad, and very bad. The 
children of rich people often get the worst education that 
is to be had for money ; the children of the poor often get 
the best for nothing. And you have really these two 
things now to decide for yourselves in England before you 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 59 

can take one quite safe practical step in the matter, name- 
ly, first, what a good education is ; and, secondly, who is 
likely to give it you. 

What it is ? " Everybody knows that," 1 suppose you 
would most of you answer. " Of course — to be taught to 
read, and write, and cast accounts ; and to learn geog- 
raphy, and geology, and astronomy, and chemistry, and 
German, and French, and Italian, and Latin, and Greek, 
and the aboriginal Aryan language." 

Well, when you have learned all that, what would you 
do next. "Next? Why then we should be perfectly 
happy, and make as much money as ever we liked, and we 
would turn out our toes before any company." I am not 
sure myself, and I don't think you can be, of any one of 
these three things. At least, as to making you very 
happy, I know something, myself, of nearly all these mat- 
ters — not much, but still quite as much as most men under 
the ordinary chances of life, with a fair education, are 
likely to get together — and I assure you the knowledge 
does not make me happy at all. When I was a boy 
I used to like seeing the sunrise. I didn't know, then, 
there were any spots on the sun ; now I do, and am always 
frightened lest any more should come. When I was a 
boy, I used to care about pretty stones. I got some Bris- 
tol diamonds at Bristol, and some dog-tooth spar in Derby- 
slrire ; my whole collection had cost, perhaps three half- 
crowns, and was worth considerably less; and I knew 
nothing whatever, rightly, about any single stone in it ; — 



60 FORS CLAVIGEEA. 

could not even spell their names : but words cannot tell 
the joy they used to give me. Now, I have a collection 
of minerals worth, perhaps, from two to three thousand 
pounds ; and I know more about some of them than most 
other people. But I am not a whit happier, either for my 
knowledge, or possessions, for other geologists dispute my 
theories, to my grievous indignation and discontentment ; 
and I am miserable about all my best specimens, because 
there are better in the British Museum. 

No, I assure you, knowlege by itself will not make you 
happy; still less will it make you rich. Perhaps you 
thought I was writing carelessly when I told you, last 
month, " science did not pay." But you don't know what 
science is. You fancy it means mechanical art ; and so 
you have put a statue of Science on the Holborn Yiaduct, 
with a steam-engine regulator in its hands. My ingenious 
friends, science has no more to do with making steam-en- 
gines than with making breeches ; though she condescends 
to help you a little in such necessary (or it may be, con- 
ceivably, in both cases, sometimes unnecessary) businesses. 
Science lives only in quiet places, and with odd people, 
mostly poor. Mr. John Kepler, for instance, who is found 
by Sir Henry Wotton "in the picturesque green country 
by the shores of the Donau, in a little black tent in a 
field, convertible, like a windmill, to all quarters, a cam- 
era-obscura, in fact. Mr. John invents rude toys, writes 
almanacks, practises medicine, for good reasons, his en- 
couragement from the Holy Roman Empire and mankind 



FOES CLAVIGEEA. 61 

being a pension of 181. a year, and that hardly ever 
paid." * That is what one gets by star-gazing, my friends. 
And you cannot be simple enough, even in April, to think 
I got my three thousand pounds' -worth of minerals by 
studying mineralogy % Not so ; they were earned for me 
by hard labour; my father's in England, and many a 
sun-burnt vineyard-dresser's in Spain. 

" What business had you, in your idleness, with their 
earnings then ? " you will perhaps ask. None, it may be ; 
I will tell you in a little while how you may find that out ; 
it is not to the point now. But it is to the point that you 
should observe I have not kept their earnings, the portion 
of them, at least, with which I bought minerals. That 
part of their earnings is 8,11 gone to feed the miners in 
Cornwall, or on the Hartz Mountains, and I have only got 
for myself a few pieces of glittering (not always that, but 
often unseemly) stone, which neither vinedressers nor 
miners cared for; which you yourselves would have to 
learn many hard words, much cramp mathematics, and 
useless chemistry, in order to care for : which, if ever you 
did care for, as I do, would most likely only make you en- 
vious of the British Museum, and occasionally uncomfort- 
able if any harm happened to your dear stones. I have a 
piece of red oxide of copper, for instance, which grieves 
me poignantly by losing its colour ; and a crystal of sul- 
phide of lead, with a chip in it, which causes me a great 

* Carlyle, Frederick, vol. i. p. 321 (first edition). 



62 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

deal of concern — in April ; because I see it then by the 
fresh sunshine. 

My oxide of copper and sulphide of lead you will not 
then wisely envy me. Neither, probably, would you covet 
a handful of hard brown gravel, with a rough pebble in 
it, whitish, and about the size of a pea ; nor a few grains 
of apparently brass filings with which the gravel is mixed. 
I was but a Fool to give good money for such things, you 
think ? It may well be. I gave thirty pounds for that 
handful of gravel, and the miners who found it were ill- 
paid then ; and it is not clear to me that this produce of 
their labour was the best possible. Shall we consider of 
if, with the help of the Cambridge Catechism? at the 
tenth page of which you will find that Mr. Mill's defini- 
tion of productive labour is — " That which produces util- 
ities fixed and embodied in material objects." 

This is very fine — indeed, superfine — English ; but I 
can, perhaps, make the meaning of the Greatest Thinker 
in England a little more lucid for you by vulgarizing his 
terms. 

" Object," you must always remember, is fine English for 
" Thing." It is a semi-Latin word, and properly means a 
thing " thrown in your way ; " so that if you put " ion " 
to the end of it, it becomes Objection. We will rather 
say "Thing," if you have no objection — you audi. A 
" Material " thing, then, of course, signifies something 
solid and tangible. It is very necessary for Political 
Economists always to insert this word "material," lest 



FOES CLAYIGEJRA. 63 

people should suppose that there was any use or value in 
Thought or Knowledge, and other such immaterial ob- 
jects. 

" Embodied " is a particularly elegant word; but super- 
fluous, because you know it would not be possible that a 
utility should be Disembodied, as long as it was in a mate- 
rial object. But when you wish to express yourself as 
thinking in a great manner, you may say — as, for instance, 
when you are supping vegetable soup — that your power of 
doing so conveniently and gracefully is " Embodied " in a 
spoon. 

" Fixed " is, I am afraid, rashly, as well as superfluously, 
introduced into his definition by Mr. Mill. It is conceiv- 
able that some Utilities may be also volatile, or planetary, 
even when embodied. But at last we come to the great 
word in the great definition — " Utility." 

And this word, I am sorry to say, puzzles me most of 
all ; for I never myself saw a Utility, either out of the 
body, or in it, and should be much embarrassed if ordered 
to produce one in either state. 

But it is fortunate for us that all this seraphic language, 
reduced to the vulgar tongue, will become, though fallen 
in dignity and reduced in dimension, perfectly intelligi- 
ble. The Greatest Thinker in England means by these 
beautiful words to tell you that Productive labour is labour 
that produces a Useful Thing. "Which, indeed, perhaps, 
you knew — or, without the assistance of great thinkers, 
might have known, before now. But if Mr. Mill had 



64 FOKS CLAVIGEKA. 

said so much, simply, you might have been tempted to ask 
farther — " What things are useful, and what are not ? " 
And as Mr. Mill does not know, nor any other Political 
Economist going, — and as they therefore particularly wish 
nobody to ask them, — it is convenient to say, instead of 
" useful things," " utilities fixed and embodied in material 
objects," because that sounds so very like complete and sat- 
isfactory information, that one is ashamed, after getting 
it, to ask for any more. 

But it is not, therefore, less discouraging that for the 
present I have got no help towards discovering whether 
my handful of gravel with the white pebble in it was 
worth my thirty pounds or not. I am afraid it is not a 
useful thing to me. It lies at the back of a drawer, locked 
up all the year round. I never look at it now, for I know 
all about it : the only satisfaction I have for my money is 
knowing that nobody else can look at it ; and if nobody 
else wanted to, I shouldn't even have that. 

" What did you buy it for then % " you will ask. Well, 
if you must have the truth, because I was a Fool, and 
wanted it. Other people have bought such things before 
me. The white stone is a diamond, and the apparent brass 
filings are gold dust ; but, I admit, nobody ever yet wanted 
such things who was in their right senses. Only now, as I 
have candidly answered all your questions, will you an- 
swer one of mine ? If I hadn't bought it, what would 
you have had me do with my money ? Keep that in the 
drawer instead % — or at my banker's, till it grew out of 



FORS CLAVIGEKA. 65 

thirty pounds into sixty and a hundred, in fulfilment of 
the law respecting seed sown in good ground ? 

Doubtless, that would have been more meritorious for 
the time. But when I had got the sixty or the hundred 
pounds — what should I have done with them f The ques- 
tion only becomes doubly and trebly serious ; and all the 
more, to me, because, when I told you last January that I 
had bought a picture for a thousand pounds, permitting 
myself in that folly for your advantage, as I thought, 
hearing that many of you wanted art Patronage, and 
wished to live by painting, — one of your own popular or- 
gans, the Liverpool Daily Courier ', of February 9th, said, 
" it showed want of taste, — of tact," and was " something 
like a mockery," to tell you so ! I am not to buy pictures, 
therefore, it seems ; — you like to be kept in mines and 
tunnels, and occasionally blown hither and thither, or 
crushed flat, rather than live by painting, in good light, 
and with the chance of remaining all day in a whole and 
unextended skin ? But what shall I buy, then, with the 
next thirty pieces of gold I can scrape together 1 Precious 
things have been bought, indeed, and sold, before now for 
thirty pieces, even of silver, but with doubtful issue. The 
over-charitable person who was bought to be killed at that 
price, indeed, advised the giving of alms ; but you won't 
have alms, I suppose — you are so independent, nor go into 
alms-houses — (and, truly, I did not much wonder, as I 
walked by the old church of Abingdon, a Sunday or two 
since, where the alms-houses are set round the churchyard, 



QQ FOBS CLAVIGERA. 

and under the level of it and with a cheerful view of it, 
except that the tombstones slightly block the light of the 
lattice- windows ; with beautiful texts from Scripture over 
the doors, to remind the paupers still more emphatically 
that, highly blessed as they were, they were yet mortal) — 
you won't go into alms-houses ; and all the clergy in Lon- 
don have been shrieking against alms-giving to the lower 
poor this whole winter long, till I am obliged, whenever I 
want to give anybody a penny, to look up and down the 
street first, to see if a clergyman's coming. Of course, I 
know I might buy as many iron railings as I please, and be 
praised ; but I've no room for them. I can't well burn 
more coals than I do, because of the blacks, which spoil 
my books; and the Americans won't let me buy any 
blacks alive, or else I would have some black dwarfs 
with parrots, such as one sees in the pictures of Paul 
Veronese. I should of course like, myself, above all 
things, to buy a pretty white girl, with a title — and I 
should get great praise for doing that— only I haven't 
money enough. White girls come dear, even when one 
buys them only like coals, for fuel. The Duke of Bed- 
ford, indeed, bought Joan of Arc, from the French, to 
burn, for only ten thousand pounds, and a pension of 
three hundred a year to the Bastard of Vendome — and I 
could and would have given that for her, and not burnt 
her ; but one hasn't such a chance every day. Will you, 
any of you, have the goodness — beggars, clergymen, work- 
men, seraphic doctors, Mr. Mill, Mr. Fawcett, or the Po- 



FOES CLAVIGERA. bj 

litical-Econoniic Professor of my own University — I chal- 
lenge you, I beseech you, all and singly, to tell me what I 
am to do with my money ? 

I mean, indeed, to give you my own poor opinion on the 
subject in May ; though I feel the more embarrassed in 
the thought of doing so, because, in this present April, I 
am so much a fool as not even to know clearly whether I 
have got any money or not. I know, indeed, that things 
go on at present as if I had ; but it seems to me that there 
must be a mistake somewhere, and that some day it will 
be found out. For instance, I have seven thousand 
pounds in what we call the Funds or Founded things ; but 
I am not comfortable about the Founding of them. All 
that I can see of them is a square bit of paper, with some 
ugly printing on it, and all that I know of them is that 
this bit of paper gives me a right to tax you every year, 
and make you pay me two hundred pounds out of your 
wages ; which is very pleasant for me ; but how long will 
you be pleased to do so ? Suppose it should occur to you, 
any summer's day, that you had better not ? Where would 
my seven thousand pounds be ? In fact, where are they 
now ? We call ourselves a rich people ; but you see this 
seven thousand pounds of mine has no real existence — it 
only means that you, the workers, are poorer by two hun- 
dred pounds a year than you would be if I hadn't got it. 
And this is surely a very odd kind of money for a country 
to boast of. Well, then, besides this, I have a bit of low 
land at Greenwich, which, as far as I see anything of it, 



68 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

is not money at all, but only mud ; and would be of as 
little use to me as my handful of gravel in the drawer, if 
it were not that an ingenious person has found out that he 
can make chimney-pots of it ; and, every quarter, he 
brings me fifteen pounds off the price of his chimney-pots ; 
so that I am always sympathetically glad when there's a 
high wind, because then I know my ingenious friend's 
business is thriving. But suppose it should come into his 
head, in any less windy month than this April, that he had 
better bring me none of the price of his chimneys ? And 
even though he should go on, as I hope he will, patiently, 
— (and I always give him a glass of wine when he brings 
me the fifteen pounds), — is this really to be called money 
of mine ? And is the country any richer because, when 
anybody's chimney-pot is blown down in Greenwich, he 
must pay something extra, to me, before he can put it on 
again ? 

Then, also, I have some houses in Marylebone, which, 
though indeed very ugly and miserable, yet, so far as they 
are actual beams and brick-bats put into shape, I might 
have imagined to be real property; only, you know, Mr. 
Mill says that people who build houses don't produce a 
commodity, but only do us a service. So I suppose my 
houses are not "utilities embodied in material objects" 
(and indeed they don't look much like it); but I know 
I have the right to keep anybody from living in them 
unless they pay me ; only suppose some day the Irish 
faith, that people ought to be lodged for nothing, should 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 69 

become an English one also — where would my money be ? 
Where is it now, except as a chronic abstraction from 
other people's earnings % 

So again, I have some land in Yorkshire — some Bank 
" Stock" (I don't in the least know what that is) — and the 
like ; but whenever I examine into these possessions, I find 
they melt into one or another form of future taxation, and 
that I am always sitting — (if I were working I shouldn't 
mind, but I am only sitting) at the receipt of Custom, and 
a Publican as well as a Sinner. And then, to embarrass 
the business further yet, I am quite at variance with other 
people about the place where this money, whatever it is, 
comes from. The Spectator, for instance, in its article of 
25th June of last year, on Mr. Goschen's " lucid and forci- 
ble speech of Friday week," says that "the country is 
once more getting rich, and the money is filtering down- 
wards to the actual workers." But whence, then, did it 
filter down to us, the actual idlers ? This is really a 
question very appropriate for April. For such golden 
rain raineth not every day, but in a showery and capri- 
cious manner, out of heaven, upon us ; mostly, as far as I 
can j adge, rather pouring down than filtering upon idle per- 
sons, and running in thinner driblets, but I hope purer 
for the filtering process, to the " actual workers." But 
where does it come from ? and in the times of drought 
between the showers, where does it go to ? " The country 
is getting rich again," says the Spectator ; but then, if the 
April clouds fail, may it get poor again ? And when it 



70 FOES CLAVIGEEA. 

again becomes poor, — when, last 25 th of June, it was poor, 
— what becomes, or had become, of the money ? Was it 
verily lost, or only torpid in the winter of our discontent ? 
or was it sown and buried in corruption, to be raised in a 
multifold power? When we are in a panic about our 
money, what do we think is going to happen to it ? Can 
no economist teach us to keep it safe after we have once 
got it ? nor any " beloved physician," — as I read the late 
Sir James Simpson is called in Edinburgh — guard even 
our solid gold against death, or at least, fits of an apo- 
plectic character, alarming to the family ? 

All these questions trouble me greatly ; but still to me 
the strangest point in the whole matter is, that though we 
idlers always speak as if we were enriched by Heaven, 
and became ministers of its bounty to you ; if ever you 
think the ministry slack, and take to definite pillage of us, 
no good ever comes of it to you ; but the sources of wealth 
seem to be stopped instantly, and you are reduced to the 
small gain of making gloves of our skins ; while, on the 
contrary, as long as we continue pillaging you, there 
seems no end to the profitableness of the business ; but 
always, however bare we strip you, presently, more, to be 
had. For instance — just read this little bit out of Frois- 
sart — about the English army in France before the battle 
of Crecy : — 

" We will now return to the expedition of the King of England- 
Sir Godfrey de Harcourt, as marshal, advanced before the King, with 
the vanguard of five hundred armed men and two thousand archers, 



FOKS CLAVIGERA. 71 

and rode on for six or seven leagues' distance from the main army, 
burning and destroying the country. They found it rich and plenti- 
ful, abounding in all things ; the barns full of every sort of corn, 
and the houses with riches : the inhabitants at their ease, having cars, 
carts, horses, swine, sheep, and everything in abundance which the 
country afforded. They seized whatever they chose of all these good 
things, and brought them to the King's army ; but the soldiers did 
not give any account to their officers, or to those appointed by the 
King, of the gold and silver they took, which they kept to them- 
selves. When they were come back, with all their booty safely packed 
in waggons, the Earl of Warwick, the Earl of Suffolk, the Lord Thomas 
Holland, and the Lord Reginald Cobhani, took their march, with 
their battalion on the right, burning and destroying the country in 
the same way that Sir Godfrey de Harcourt was doing. The King 
marched, with the main body, between these two battalions; and 
every night they all encamped together. The King of England and 
Prince of Wales had, in their battalion, about three thousand men-at- 
arms, six thousand archers, ten thousand infantry, without counting 
those that were under the marshals ; and they inarched on in the 
manner I have before mentioned, burning and destroying the coun- 
try, but without breaking their line of battle. They did not turn 
towards Coutances, but advanced to St. Lo, in Coutantin, which in 
those days was a very rich and commercial town, and worth three 
such towns as Coutances. In the town of St. Lo was much drapery, 
and many wealthy inhabitants ; among them you might count eight 
or nine score that were engaged in commerce. When the King of 
England was come near to the town, he encamped ; he would not 
lodge in it for fear of fire. He sent, therefore, his advanced guard 
forward, who soon conquered it, at a trifling loss, and completely 
plundered it. No one can imagine the quantity of riches they found 
in it, nor the number of bales of cloth. If there had been any pur- 
chasers, they might have bought enough at a very cheap rate. 

"The English then advanced towards Caen, which is a much 
larger town, stronger, and fuller of draperies and all other sorts of 
merchandize, rich citizens, noble dames and damsels, and fine 
churches. 

" On this day (Froissart does not say what day) the English rose 



72 FOES CLAVIGEKA. 

very early, and made themselves ready to march to Caen ; the King 
heard mass before sunrise, and afterwards mounting his horse, with 
the Prince of Wales, and Sir Godfrey de Harcourt (who was marshal 
and director of the army), marched forward in order of battle. The 
battalion of the marshals led the van, and came near to the handsome 
town of Caen. 

"When the townsmen, who had taken the field, perceived the Eng- 
lish advancing, with banners and pennons flying in abundance, and 
saw those archers whom they had not been accustomed to, they were 
so frightened that they betook themselves to flight, and ran for the 
town in great disorder. 

"The English, who were after the runaways, made great havoc; 
for they spared none. 

"Those inhabitants who had taken refuge in the garrets flung 
down from them, in these narrow streets, stones, benches, and what- 
ever they could lay hands on ; so that they killed and wounded up- 
wards of five hundred of the English, which so enraged the King 
of England, when he received the reports in the evening, that he or- 
dered the remainder of the inhabitants to be put to the sword, and 
the town burnt. But Sir Godfrey de Harcourt said to him : ' Dear 
sir, assuage somewhat of your anger, and be satisfied with what has 
already been done. You have a long journey yet to make before you 
arrive at Calais, whither it is your intention to go : and there are in 
this town a great number of inhabitants, who will defend themselves 
obstinately in their houses, if you force them to it : besides, it will 
cost you many lives before the town can be destroyed, which may 
put a stop to your expedition to Calais, and it will not redound to 
your honour : therefore be sparing of your men, for in a month's 
time you will have call for them.' The King replied : ' Sir Godfrey, 
you are our marshal ; therefore order as you please ; for this time we 
wish not to interfere.' 

" Sir Godfrey then rode through the streets, his banner displayed 
before him, and ordered, in the King's name, that no one should 
dare, under pain of immediate death, to insult or hurt man or wo- 
man of the town, or attempt to set fire to any part of it. Several of 
the inhabitants, on hearing this proclamation, received the English 
into their houses ; and others opened their coffers to them, giving up 
their all, since they were assured of their lives. However, there 



FORS CLAVIGERA. 7d 

were, in spite of these orders, many atrocious thefts and murders 
committed. The English continued masters of the town for three 
days ; in this time, they amassed great wealth, which they sent in 
barges down the river of Estreham, to St. Saveur, two leagues off, 
where their fleet was. The Earl of Huntingdon made preparations, 
therefore, with the two hundred men-at-arms and his four hundred 
archers, to carry over to England their riches and prisoners. The 
King purchased, from Sir Thomas Holland and his companions, the 
constable of France and the Earl of Tancarville, and paid down 
twenty thousand nobles for them. 

" When the King had finished his business in Caen, and sent his 
fleet to England, loaded with cloths, jewels, gold and silver plate, 
and a quantity of other riches, and upwards of sixty knights, with 
three hundred able citizens, prisoners ; he then left his quarters and 
continued his march as before, his two marshals on Ms right and 
left, burning and destroying all the flat country. He took the road 
to Evreux, but found he could not gain anything there, as it was 
well fortified. He went on towards another town called Louviers, 
which was in Normandy, and where there were many manufactories 
of cloth ; it was rich and commercial. The English won it easily, 
as it was not inclosed ; and having entered the town, it was plun- 
dered without opposition. They collected much wealth there ; and, 
after they had done what they pleased, they marched on into the 
county of Evreux, where they burnt everything except the fortified 
towns and castles, which the King left unattacked, as he was desirous 
of sparing his men and artillery. He therefore made for the banks 
of the Seine, in his approach to Rouen, where there were plenty of 
men-at-arms from Normandy, under the command of the Earl of 
Harcourt, brother to Sir Godfrey, and the Earl of Dreux. 

" The English did not march direct towards Rouen, but went to 
Gisors, which has a strong castle, and burnt the town. After this, 
they destroyed Vernon, and all the country between Rouen and 
Pont-de-1'Arche : they then came to Mantes and Meulan, which they 
treated hi the same manner, and ravaged all the country round about. 

" They passed by the strong castle of Roulleboise, and everywhere 
found the bridges on the Seine broken down. They pushed forward 
until they came to Poissy, where the bridge was also destroyed ; but 
the beams and other parts of it were lying in the i iver. 
4 



74 FOBS CLAVK.KKA. 

" The King of England remained at the nunnery of Poissy to the 
middle in August, and celebrated there the feast of the Virgin 

Mary." 

It all reads at first, you see, just like a piece out of 
the newspapers of last month ; but there are material 
differences, notwithstanding. We fight inelegantly as 
well as expensively, with machines instead of bow and 
spear ; we kill about a thousand now to the score then, 
in settling any quarrel — (Agincourt was won with the 
loss of less than a hundred men ; only 25,000 English 
altogether were engaged at Crecy ; and 12,000, some 
say only 8,000, at Poictiers) ; Ave kill with far ghastlier 
wounds, crashing bones and flesh together ; we leave our 
wounded necessarily for days and nights in heaps on 
the fields of battle ; Ave pillage districts twenty times as 
large, and with completer destruction of more valuable 
property ; and with a destruction as irreparable as it is 
complete ; for if the French or English burnt a church 
one day, they could build a prettier one the next ; but 
the modern Prussians couldn't even build so much as 
an imitation of one ; we rob on credit, by requisition, 
AA-ith ingenious mercantile prolongations of claim ; and 
Ave improve contention of arms with contention of tongues, 
and are able to multiply the rancour of coAvardice, and 
mischief of lying, in universal and permanent print ; and 
so we lose our tempers as well as our money, and become 
indecent in behaviour as in raggedness ; for whereas, in 
old times, two nations separated by a little pebbly stream 



FOES CLAVIGERA. <0 

like the Tweed, or even the two halves of one nation, 
separated by thirty fathoms' depth of salt water (for 
most of the English knights and all the English kings 
were French by race, and the best of them by birth also) 
— would go on pillaging and killing each other century 
after century, without the slightest ill-feeling towards, or 
disrespect for one another, — we can neither give anybody 
a beating courteously, nor take one in good part, or with- 
out screaming and lying about it : and finally, we add to 
these perfected Follies of Action more finely perfected 
Follies of Inaction ; and contrive hitherto unheard-of 
ways of being wretched through the very abundance of 
peace ; our workmen, here, vowing themselves to idleness, 
lest they should lower Wages, and there, being condemned 
by their parishes to idleness lest they should lower Prices ; 
while outside the workhouse all the parishioners are buy- 
ing anything nasty, so that it be cheap ; and, in a word, 
under the seraphic teaching of Mr. Mill, we have deter- 
mined at last that it is not Destruction, but Production, 
that is the cause of human distress ; and the "Mutual and 
Co-operative Colonization Company " declares, ungram- 
matically, but distinctly, in its circular sent to me on the 
13th of last month, as a matter universally admitted, even 
among Cabinet Ministers — " that it is in the greater in- 
creasing power of production and distribution, as com- 
pared with demand, enabling the few to do the work of 
many, that the active cause of the wide-spread poverty 
among the producing and lower-middle classes lay, which 



76 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

entails such enormous burdens on the Ration, and ex- 
hibits our boasted progress in the light of a monstrous 
Sham." 

Nevertheless, however much we have magnified and 
multiplied the follies of the past, the primal and essen- 
tial principles of pillage have always been accepted ; and 
from the days when England lay so waste under that 
worthy and economical King who " called his tailor lown," 
that " whole families, after sustaining life as long as they 
could by eating roots, and the flesh of dogs and horses, 
at last died of hunger, and you might see many pleasant 
villages without a single inhabitant of either sex," while 
little Harry Switch-of-Broom sate learning to spell in 
Bristol Castle, (taught, I think, properly by his good 
uncle the preceptorial use of his name-plant, though 
they say the first Harry was the finer clerk,) and his 
mother, dressed all in white, escaped from Oxford over 
the snow in the moonlight, through Bagley Wood here 
to Abingdon ; and under the snows, by Woodstock, the 
buds were growing for the bower of his Rose, — from 
that day to this, when the villages round Paris, and 
food-supply, are, by the blessing of God, as they then 
were round London — Kings have for the most part desired 
to win that pretty name of " Switch-of-Broom " rather by 
habit of growing in waste places ; or even emulating 
the Yision of Dion in " sweeping — diligently sweeping," 
than by attaining the other virtue of the Planta Genista, 
set forth by Yirgil and Pliny, that it is pliant, and 



FOES CLAVIGEEA. 77 

rich in honey; the Lion-hearts of them seldom proving 
profitable to you, even so much as the stomach of Sam- 
son's Lion, or rendering it a soluble enigma in our 
Israel, that " out of the eater came forth meat ; " nor has 
it been only your Kings who have thus made you pay for 
their guidance through the world, but your ecclesiastics 
have also made you pay for guidance out of it — particu- 
larly when it grew dark, and the signpost was illegible 
where the upper and lower roads divided ; — so that, as far 
as I can read or calculate, dying has been even more ex- 
pensive to you than living ; and then, to finish the busi- 
ness, as your virtues have been made costly to you by the 
clergymen, so your vices have been made costly to you by 
the lawyers ; and you have one entire learned profession 
living on your sins, and the other on your repentance. 
So that it is no wonder that, things having gone on thus 
for a long time, you begin to think that you would rather 
live as sheep without any shepherd, and that having paid so 
dearly for your instruction in religion and law, you should 
now set your hope on a state of instruction in Irreligion 
and Liberty, which is, indeed, a form of education to be 
had for nothing, alike by the children of the Rich and 
Poor ; the saplings of the tree that was to be desired to 
make us wise, growing now in copsewood on the hills, or 
even by the roadsides, in a Republican Plantagenet man- 
ner, blossoming into cheapest gold, either for coins, which 
of course you Republicans will call, not ^Tobies, but Ig- 
nobles ; or crowns, second and third hand — (head, I should 



78 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

say) — supplied punctually on demand, with liberal reduc- 
tion on quantity ; the roads themselves beautifully public 
— tramwayed, perhaps — and with gates set open enough 
for all men to the free, outer, better world, your chosen 
guide preceding you merrily, thus, — 



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with music and dancing. 

You have always danced too willingly, poor friends, to 
that player on the viol. We will try to hear, far away, a 
faint note or two from a more chief musician on stringed 
instruments, in May, when the time of the Singing of 
Birds is come. 

Faithfully yours, 

JOHN KUSKIK 



LETTER Y. 

4i For lo, the winter is past, 
The rain is over and gone, 
The flowers appear on the earth, 
The time of the singing of birds is come. 
Arise, oh my fair one, my dove, 
And come." 

Dexmark Hell, 
My Friers, 1«* May, 1871. 

It has been asked of me, very justly, why I have 
hitherto written to yon of tilings you were little likely to 
care for. in words which it was difficult for you to under- 
stand. 

I have no fear but that you will one day understand all 
my poor words, — the saddest of them perhaps too well. 
But I have great fear that you may never come to under- 
stand these written above, which are part of a king's love- 
song, in one sweet Mav, of manv long since guiie. 

I fear that for you the wild winter's rain may never 
pass, — the flowers never appear on the earth ; — that for 
you no bird may ever sing ; — for you no perfect Love 
arise, and fulfil your life in peace. 

•* And why not for us, as for others ? r ' will you answer 
me so, and take my fear for you as an insult ? 

Nay, it is no insult; — nor am I happier than you. For 
me, the birds do not sing, nor ever will. But they would, 
for you. if vou cared to have it so. When I told vou that 



80 FOES CLAVIGEEA. 

you would never understand that love-song, I meant only 
that you would not desire to understand it. 

Are you again indignant with me? Do you think, 
though you should labour, and grieve, and be trodden 
down in dishonour all your days, at least you can keep 
that one joy of Love, and that one honour of Home % 
Had you, indeed, kept that, you had kept all. But no 
men yet, in the history of the race, have lost it so pite- 
ously. In many a country, and many an age, women have 
been compelled to labour for their husbands' wealth, or 
bread ; but never until now were they so homeless as to 
say, like the poor Samaritan, " I have no husband." 
Women of every country and people have sustained with- 
out complaint the labour of fellowship : for the women of 
the latter days in England it has been reserved to claim 
the privilege of isolation. 

This, then, is the end of your universal education and 
civilization, and contempt of the ignorance of the Middle 
Ages, and of their chivalry. Not only do you declare 
yourselves too indolent to labour for daughters and wives, 
and too poor to support them ; but you have made the 
neglected and distracted creatures hold it for an honour 
to be independent of you, and shriek for some hold of the 
mattock for themselves. Believe it or not, as you may, 
there has not been so low a level of thought reached by any 
race, since they grew to be male and female out of star- 
fish, or chickweed, or whatever else they have been made 
from, by natural selection, — according to modern science. 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 81 

That modern science also, Economic and of other 
kinds, has reached its climax at last. For it seems to be 
the appointed function of the nineteenth century to ex- 
hibit in all things the elect pattern of perfect Folly, for a 
warning to the farthest future. Thus the statement of 
principle which I quoted to you in my last letter, from the 
circular of the Emigration Society, that it is over-produc- 
tion which is the cause of distress, is accurately the most 
Foolish thing, not only hitherto ever said by men, but 
which it is possible for men ever to say, respecting their 
own business. It is a kind of opposite pole (or negative 
acme of mortal stupidity) to Newton's discovery of grav- 
itation as an acme of mortal wisdom : — as no wise being 
on earth will ever be able to make such another wise dis- 
covery, so no foolish being on earth will ever be capable 
of saying such another foolish thing, through all the 
ages. 

And the same crisis has been exactly reached by our 
natural science, and by our art. It has several times 
chanced to me, since I began these papers, to have the ex- 
act thing shown or brought to me that I wanted for illus- 
tration, just in time *— and it happened that on the very 

* Here is another curious instance : I have but a minute ago finished 
correcting these sheets, and take up the Times of this morning-, April 
21st, and find in it the suggestion by the Chancellor of the Exchequer 
for the removal of exemption from taxation, of Agricultural horses and 
carts, in the very nick of time to connect it, as a proposal for economic 
practice, with the statement of economic principle respecting Produc- 
tion, quoted on this page. 
4* 



82 FORS CLAVIGERA. 

day on which I published my last letter, I had to go to 
the Kensington Museum ; and there I saw the most per- 
fectly and roundly ill-done thing which, as yet, in my 
whole life, I ever saw produced by art. It had a tablet 
in front of it, bearing this inscription, — 

" Statue in black and white marble, a Newfoundland Dog standing 
on a Serpent, which rests on a marble cushion, the pedestal ornamented 
with pietra dura fruits in relief . — English. Present Century. No. I." 

It was so very right for me, the Kensington people hav- 
ing been good enough to number it " I.," the thing itself 
being almost incredible in its one-ness; and, indeed, 
such a punctual accent over the iota of Miscreation, — so 
absolutely and exquisitely miscreant, that I am not myself 
capable of conceiving a Number two, or three, or any 
rivalship or association with it whatsoever. The extremity 
of its unvirtue consisted, observe, mainly in the quantity 
of instruction which was abused in it. It showed that the 
persons who produced it had seen everything, and prac- 
tised everything ; and misunderstood everything they saw, 
and misapplied everything they did. They had seen Ro- 
man work, and Florentine work, and Byzantine work, and 
Gothic work; and misunderstanding of everything had 
passed through them as the mud does through earthworms, 
and here at last was their worm-cast of a Production. 

But the second chance that came to me that day, was 
more significant still. From the Kensington Museum I 
went to an afternoon tea, at a house where I was sure to 



FOES CLAVIGEKA. &6 

meet some nice people. And among the first I met was 
an old friend who had been hearing some lectures on bot- 
any at the Kensington Museum, and been delighted by 
them. She is the kind of person who gets good out of 
everything, and she was quite right in being delighted ; 
besides that, as I found by her account of them, the lec- 
tures were really interesting, and pleasantly given. She 
had expected botany to be dull, and had not found it so, 
and " had learned so much." On hearing this I proceeded 
naturally to inquire what ; for my idea of her was that 
before she went to the lectures at all, she had known more 
botany than she was likely to learn by them. So she told 
me that she had learned first of all that there " were seven 
sorts of leaves." Now I have always a great suspicion of 
the number Seven; because when I wrote the Seven 
Lamps of Architecture, it required all the ingenuity I was 
master of to prevent them from becoming Eight, or even 
Nine, on my hands. So I thought to myself that it would 
be very charming if there were only seven sorts of leaves ; 
but that, perhaps, if one looked the woods and forests of 
the world carefully through, it was just possible that one 
might discover as many as eight sorts ; and then where 
would my friend's new knowledge of Botany be ? So I 
said, " That was very pretty ; but what more % " Then 
my friend told me that she had no idea, before, that petals 
were leaves. On which, I thought to myself that it would 
not have been any great harm to her if she had remained 
under her old impression that petals were petals. But I 



84: FOES CLAVIGEKA. 

said, " That was very pretty, too ; and what more ? " So 
then my friend told me that the lecturer said, " the object 
of his lectures would be entirely accomplished if he could 
convince his hearers that there was no such thing as a 
flower." Eow, in that sentence you have the most perfect 
and admirable summary given you of the general temper 
and purposes of modern science. It gives lectures on 
Botany, of which the object is to show that there is no 
such thing as a Flower ; on Humanity, to show that there 
is no such thing as a Man ; and on Theology, to show there 
is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a Man, but 
only a Mechanism ; no such thing as a God, but only a 
series of Forces. The two faiths are essentially one : if 
you feel yourself to be only a machine, constructed to be 
a Regulator of minor machinery, you will put your statue 
of such science on your Holborn Yiaduct, and necessarily 
recognize only major machinery as regulating you, 

I must explain the real meaning to you, however, of 
that saying of the Botanical lecturer, for it has a wide 
bearing. Some fifty years ago the poet Goethe discovered 
that all the parts of plants had a kind of common nature, 
and would change into each other. Now this was a true 
discovery, and a notable one ; and you will find that, in 
fact, all plants are composed of essentially two parts — the 
leaf and root — one loving the light, the other darkness ; 
one liking to be clean, the other to be dirty ; one liking to 
grow for the most part up, the other for the most part 
down ; and each having faculties and purposes of its own. 



FOES CLAVIGEEA. 85 

But the pure one, which loves the light, has, above all 
things, the purpose of being married to another leaf, and 
having child-leaves, and children's children of leaves, to 
make the earth fair for ever. And when the leaves marry, 
they put on wedding-robes, and are more glorious than 
Solomon in all his glory, and they have feasts of honey, 
and we call them " Flowers." 

In a certain sense, therefore, you see the Botanical lec- 
turer was quite right. There are no such things as Flow- 
ers — there are only Leaves. Nay, farther than this, there 
may be a dignity in the less happy, but unwithering leaf, 
which is, in some sort, better than the brief lily of its 
bloom ; — which the great poets always knew, — well ; — 
Chaucer, before Goethe ; and the writer of the First 
Psalm, before Chaucer. The Botanical lecturer was in a 
deeper sense than he knew, right. 

But in the deepest sense of all, the Botanical lecturer 
was, to the extremity of wrongness, wrong ; for leaf, and 
root, and fruit exist, all of them, only — that there may be 
flowers. He disregarded the life and passion of the crea- 
ture, which were its essence. Had he looked for these, 
he would have recognized that in the thought of Nature 
herself, there is, in a plant, nothing else but its flowers. 

Now in exactly the sense that modern Science declares 
there is no such thing as a Flower, it has declared- there is 
no such thing as a Man, but only a transitional form of 
Ascidians and apes. It may, or may not be true — it is not 
of the smallest consequence whether it be or not. The 



86 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

real fact is, that, seen with human eyes, there is nothing 
else but man ; that all animals and beings beside him are 
only made that they may change into him ; that the world 
truly exists only in the presence of Man, acts only in the 
passion of Man. The essence of Light is in his eyes, — the 
centre of Force in his soul, — the pertinence of Action in 
his deeds. 

And all true science — which my Savoyard guide rightly 
scorned me when he thought I had not, — all true science 
is "savoir vivre." Bat all your modern science is the 
contrary of that. It is " savoir mourir." 

And of its very discoveries, such as they are, it cannot 
make use. 

That telegraphic signalling was a discovery; and con- 
ceivably, some day, may be a useful one. And there was 
some excuse for your being a little proud when, about last 
sixth of April (Coeur de Lion's death-day, and Albert 
Durer's), you knotted a copper wire all the way to Bom- 
bay, and flashed a message along it, and back. 

But what was the message, and what the answer? Is 
India the better for what you said to her ? Are you the 
better for what she replied % 

If not, you have only wasted an all-round-the-world's 
length of copper wire, — which is, indeed, about the sum of 
your doing. If you had had, perchance, two words of 
common sense to say, though you had taken wearisome 
time and trouble to send them ; — though you had written 
them slowly in gold, and sealed them with a hundred seals, 



FORS CLAYIGEKA. 87 

and sent a squadron of ships of the line to cany the scroll, 
and the squadron had fought its way round the Cape of 
Good Hope, through a year of storms, with loss of all its 
ships but one, — the two words of common sense would 
have been worth the carriage, and more. But you have 
not anything like so much as that, to say, either to India, 
or to any other place. 

You think it a great triumph to make the sun draw 
brown landscapes for you. That was also a discovery, 
and some day may be useful. But the sun had drawn 
landscapes before for you, not in brown, but in green, and 
blue, and all imaginable colours, here in England. ISot 
one of you ever looked at them then ; not one of you 
cares for the loss of them now, when you have shut the 
sun out with smoke, so that he can draw nothing more, 
except brown blots through a hole in a box. There was 
a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon 
a time, divine as the Yale of Tempe ; you might have 
seen the Gods there morning and evening — Apollo and all 
the sweet Muses of the Light — walking in fair procession 
on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles of 
its crags. You cared neither for Gods nor grass, but for 
cash (which you did not know the way to get) ; you 
thought you could get it by what the Times calls " Bail- 
road Enterprise." You Enterprised a Railroad through 
the valley — you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands 
of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, 
and the Gods with it ; and now, every fool in Buxton can 



88 FOBS CLAVIGEKA. 

be at Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bake- 
well at Buxton ; which you think a lucrative process of 
exchange — you Fools Everywhere. 

To talk at a distance, when you have nothing to say, 
though you were ever so near; to go fast from this place 
to that, with nothing to do either at one or the other : 
these are powers certainly. Much more, power of in- 
creased Production, if you, indeed, had got it, would be 
something to boast of. But are you so entirely sure that 
you have got it — that the mortal disease of plenty, and 
afflictive affluence of good things, are all you have to 
dread ? 

Observe. A man and a woman, with their children, 
properly trained, are able easily to cultivate as much 
ground as will feed them; to build as much wall and 
roof as will lodge them, and to spin and weave as much 
cloth as will clothe them. They can all be perfectly 
happy and healthy in doing this. Supposing that they 
invent machinery which will build, plough, thresh, cook, 
and weave, and that they have none of these things any 
more to do, but may read, or play croquet, or cricket, all 
day long, I believe myself that they will neither be so 
good nor so happy as without the machines. But I waive 
my belief in this matter for the time. I will assume that 
they become more refined and moral persons, and that 
idleness is in future to be the mother of all good. But 
observe, I repeat, the power of your machine is only in 
enabling them to be idle. It will not enable them to live 



FOES CLAVTGEEA. 89 

better than they did before, nor to live in greater numbers. 
Get your heads quite clear on this matter. Out of so 
much ground, only so much living is to be got, with or 
without machinery. You may set a million of steam- 
ploughs to work on an acre, if you like — out of that acre 
only a given number of grains of corn will grow, scratch 
or scorch it as you will. So that the question is not at 
all whether, by having more machines, more of you can 
live. No machines will increase the possibilities of life. 
They only increase the possibilities of idleness. Suppose, 
for instance, you could get the oxen in your plough driven 
by a goblin, who would ask for no pay, not even a cream 
bowl, — (you have nearly managed to get it driven by an 
iron goblin, as it is ;) — Well, your furrow will take no 
more seeds than if you had held the stilts yourself. But, 
instead of holding them, you sit, I presume, on a bank be- 
side the field, under an eglantine; — watch the goblin at 
his work, and read poetry. Meantime, your wife in the 
house has also got a goblin to weave and wash for her. 
And she is lying on the sofa, reading poetry. 

Now, as I said, I don't believe you would be happier 
so, but I am willing to believe it ; only, since you are 
already such brave mechanists, show me at least one or 
two places where you are happier. Let me see one small 
example of approach to this seraphic condition. I can 
show you examples, millions of them, of happy people, 
made happy by their own industry. Farm after farm I 
can show you in Bavaria, Switzerland, the Tvrol. and such 



90 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

other places, where men and women are perfectly happy 
and good, without any iron servants. Show me, therefore, 
some English family, with its fiery familiar, happier than 
these. Or bring me — for I am not inconvincible by any 
kind of evidence, — bring me the testimony of an English 
family or two to their increased felicity. Or if you can- 
not do so much as that, can you convince even themselves 
of it ? They are perhaps happy, if only they knew how 
happy they were ; Virgil thought so, long ago, of simple 
rustics ; but you hear at present your steam-propelled 
rustics are crying out that they are anything else than 
happy, and that they regard their boasted progress " in 
the light of a monstrous Sham." I must tell you one 
little thing, however, which greatly perplexes my im- 
agination of the relieved ploughman sitting under his 
rose bower, reading poetry. I have told it you before, 
indeed, but I forget where. There was really a great 
festivity, and expression of satisfaction in the new order 
of things, down in Cumberland, a little while ago ; some 
first of May, I think it was, a country festival, such as the 
old heathens, who had no iron servants, used to keep 
with piping and dancing. So I thought, from the 
liberated country people — their work all done for them 
by goblins — we should have some extraordinary piping 
and dancing. But there was no dancing at all, and they 
could not even provide their own piping. They had their 
goblin to Pipe for them. They walked in procession 
after their steam plough, a: id their steam plough whistled 



FOES CLAVIGEEA. 91 

to them occasionally in the most melodious manner it 
could. Which seemed to me, indeed, a return to more 
than Arcadian simplicity; for in old Arcadia, plough- 
boys truly whistled as they went, for want of thought ; 
whereas, here was verily a large company walking with- 
out thought, but not having any more even the capacity of 
doing their own Whistling. 

But next, as to the inside of the house. Before you 
got your power-looms, a woman could always make her- 
self a chemise and petticoat of bright and pretty appear- 
ance. I have seen a Bavarian peasant-woman at church 
in Munich, looking a much grander creature, and more 
beautifully dressed, than any of the crossed and embroid- 
ered angels in Hesse's high-art frescoes ; (which happened 
to be just above her, so that I could look from one to the 
other). Well, here you are, in England, served by house- 
hold demons, with five hundred fingers, at least, weaving, 
for one that used to weave in the days of Minerva. You 
ought to be able to show me five hundred dresses for one 
that used to be ; tidiness ought to have become five hun- 
dred fold tidier ; tapestry should be increased into cinque- 
cento-fold iridescence of tapestry. !Not only your peasant- 
girl ought to be lying on the sofa reading poetry, but she 
ought to have in her wardrobe five hundred petticoats in- 
stead of one. Is that, indeed, your issue % or are you only 
on a curiously crooked way to it ? 

It is just possible, indeed, that you may not have been 
allowed to get the use of the goblin's work — that other 



92 FORS CLAVIGERA. 

people may have got the use of it, and yon none ; because, 
perhaps, yon have not been able to evoke goblins wholly 
for yonr own personal service ; but have been borrowing 
goblins from the capitalist, and paying interest, in the 
" position of William," on ghostly self -going planes ; but 
suppose yon had laid by capital enough, yourselves, to 
hire all the demons in the world, — nay, — all that are in- 
side of it ; are you quite sure you know what you might 
best set them to work at ? and what " useful things " you 
should command them to make for you ? I told you, last 
month, that no economist going (whether by steam or 
ghost,) knew what are useful things and what are not. 
Very few of you know, yourselves, except by bitter expe- 
rience of the want of them. And no demons, either of 
iron or spirit, can ever make them. 

There are three Material things, not only useful, but 
essential to Life. No one " knows how to live " till he has 
got them. 

These are, Pure Air, Water, and Earth. 

There are three Immaterial things, not only useful, but 
essential to Life. No one knows how to live till he has 
got them also. 

These are, Admiration, Hope, and Love.* 

Admiration — the power of discerning and taking de- 
light in what is beautiful in visible Form, and lovely in 
human Character; and, necessarily, striving to produce 

* Wordsworth, Excursion, Book 4th ; in Moxon's edition, 1857 (stu- 
pidly without numbers to lines), vol. vi. p. 135. 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 93 

what is beautiful iu form, aud to become what is lovely in 
character. 

Hope — the recognition, by true Foresight, of better 
things to be reached hereafter, whether by ourselves or 
others ; necessarily issuing in the straightforward and 
undisappointable effort to advance, according to our pro- 
per power, the gaining of them. 

Love, both of family and neighbour, faithful, and 
satisfied. 

These are the six chiefly useful things to be got by 
Political Economy, when it has become a science. I 
will briefly tell you what modern Political Economy — the 
great " savoir mourir " — is doing with them. 

The first three, I said, are Pure Air, Water, and 
Earth. 

Heaven gives you the main elements of these. You 
can destroy them at your pleasure, or increase, almost 
without limit, the available quantities of them. 

You can vitiate the air by your manner of life, and of 
death, to any extent. You might easily vitiate it so as to 
bring such a pestilence on the globe as would end all of 
you. You or your fellows, German and French, are at 
present busy in vitiating it to the best of your power in 
every direction ; — chiefly at this moment with corpses, and 
animal and vegetable ruin in war : changing men, horses, 
and garden-stuff into noxious gas. But everywhere, and 
all day long, you are vitiating it with foul chemical exha- 
lations ; and the horrible nests, which you call towns, are 



94 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

little more than laboratories for the distillation into hea- 
ven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia 
from decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata 
from purulent disease. 

On the other hand, your power of purifying the air, 
by dealing properly and swiftly with all substances in 
corruption; by absolutely forbidding noxious manu- 
factures ; and by planting in all soils the trees which 
cleanse and invigorate earth and atmosphere, — is liter- 
ally infinite. You might make every breath of air you 
draw, food. 

Secondly, your power over the rain and river- waters of 
the earth is infinite. You can bring rain where you will, 
by planting wisely and tending carefully ; — drought, 
where you will, by ravage of woods and neglect of the 
soil. You might have the rivers of England as pure as 
the crystal of the rock ; — beautiful in falls, in lakes, in 
living pools ; — so full of fish that you might take them 
out with your hands instead of nets. Or you may do 
always as you have done now, turn every river of England 
into a common sewer, so that you cannot so much as bap- 
tize an English baby but with filth, unless you hold its 
face out in the rain ; and even that falls dirty. 

Then for the third, Earth, — meant to be nourishing for 
you, and blossoming. You have learned, about it, that 
there is no such thing as a flower ; and as far as your 
scientific hands and scientific brains, inventive of explosive 
and deathful, instead of blossoming and life-giving, Dust, 



FORS CLAVIGERA. 95 

can contrive, you have turned the Mother-Earth, Deme 
ter,* into the Avenger-Earth, Tisiphone — with the voice of 
your brother's blood crying out of it, in one wild harmony 
round all its murderous sphere. 



* Read this, for instance, concerning the Gardens of Paris: — one sen- 
tence in the letter is omitted ; I will give it in full elsewhere, with its 
necessary comments : — 

" To the Editor of the Times. 

li 5th April, 1871. 

" Sie, — As the paragraph you quoted on Monday from the Field gives 
no idea of the destruction in the gardens round Paris, if you can spare 
me a very little space I will endeavour to supplement it. 

11 The public gardens in the interior of Paris, including the planting on 
the greater number of the Boulevards, are in a condition perfectly sur- 
prising when one considers the sufferings even well-to-do persons had to 
endure for want of fuel during the siege. Some of them, like the little 
oases in the centre of the Louvre, even look as pretty as ever. After 
a similar ordeal it is probable we should not have a stick left in London, 
and the presence of the very handsome planes on the Boulevards, and 
large trees in the various squares and gardens, after the winter of 1870- 
71, is most creditable to the population. But when one goes beyond the 
Champs Elysees and towards the Bois, down the once beautiful Avenue 
de l'lmperatrice, a sad scene of desolation presents itself. A year ago it 
was the finest avenue garden in existence ; now a considerable part of 
the surface where troops were camped is about as filthy and as cheerless 
as Leicester Square or a sparsely furnished rubbish yard. 

" The view into the once richly- wooded Bois from the huge and ugly 
banks of earth which now cross the noble roads leading into it is deso- 
late indeed, the stumps of the trees cut down over a large extent of its 
surface reminding one of the dreary scenes observable in many parts of 
Canada and the United States, where the stumps of the burnt or cut- 
down pines are allowed to rot away for years. The zone of ruins round 
the vast belt of fortifications I need not speak of, nor of the other zone 
of destruction round each of the forts, as here houses and gardens and 
all have disappeared. But the destruction in the wide zone occupied 
by French and Prussian outposts is beyond description. I got to Paris 
the morning after the shooting of Generals Clement Thomas and Le- 



96 FORS CLAVIGERA. 

That is what you have done for the Three Material 
Useful Things. 

Then for the Three Immaterial Useful Things. For 
Admiration, you have learnt contempt and conceit. 
There is no lovely thing ever yet done by man that you 
care for, or can understand ; but you are persuaded you 
are able to do much finer things yourselves. You gather, 

comte, and in consequence did not see so much of it as I otherwise might 
have done ; but round the villages of Sceaux, Bourg-la-Reine, L'Hay, 
Vitry, and Villejuif , I saw an amount of havoc which the subscriptions 
to the French Horticultural Relief Fund will go but a very small way to 
repair. Notwithstanding all his revolutions and wars, the Frenchman 
usually found time to cultivate a few fruit-trees, and the neighbourhood 
of the villages above mentioned were only a few of many covered by 
nurseries of young trees. When I last visited Vitry, in the autumn of 
1868, the fields and hill-sides around were everywhere covered with 
trees ; now the view across them is only interrupted by stumps about a 
foot high. When at Vitry on the 28th of March, I found the once fine 
nursery of M. Honore Desfresne deserted, and many acres once covered 
with large stock and specimens cleared to the ground. And so it was in 
numerous other cases. It may give some notion of the effect of the war 
on the gardens and nurseries around Paris, when I state that, according 
to returns made up just before my visit to Vitry and Villejuif, it was 
found that round these two villages alone 2,400,400 fruit and other trees 
were destroyed. As to the private gardens, I cannot give a better idea 
of them than by describing the materials composing the protecting bank 
of a battery near Sceaux. It was made up of mattresses, sofas, and almost 
every other large article of furniture, with the earth stowed between. 
There were, in addition, nearly forty orange and oleander tubs gathered 
from the little gardens in the neighbourhood visible in various parts of 
this ugly bank. One nurseryman at Sceaux, M. Keteleer, lost 1,500 vols, 
of books, which were not taken to Germany, but simply mutilated and 
thrown out of doors to rot. . . . Multiply these few instances by the 
number of districts occupied by the belligerents during the war, and 
some idea of the effects of glory on gardening in France may be obtained. 

"W. Robinson." 



FOES CLAVIGEEA. 97 

and exhibit together, as if equally instructive, what is in- 
finitely bad, with what is infinitely good. You do not 
know which is which ; you instinctively prefer the Bad, 
and do more of it. You instinctively hate the Good, and 
destroy it.* 

Then, secondly, for Hope. You have not so much 
spirit of it in you as to begin any plan which will not pay 
for ten years; nor so much intelligence of it in you, 
(either politicians or workmen), as to be able to form 
one clear idea of what you would like your country to 
become. 

Then, thirdly, for Love. You were ordered by the 
Founder of your religion to love your neighbour as 
yourselves. 

You have founded an entire Science of Political Econ- 
omy, on what you have stated to be the constant instinct 
of man — the desire to defraud his neighbour. 

And you have driven your women mad, so that they 
ask no more for Love, nor for fellowship with you ; but 
stand against you, and ask for " justice." 

* Last night (I am writing' this on the 18th of April) I got a letter 
from Venice, bringing me the, I believe, too well-grounded, report that 
the Venetians have requested permission from the government of Italy 
to pull down their Ducal Palace, and ' ' rebuild " it. Put up a horrible 
model of it, in its place, that is to say, for which their architects may 
charge a commission. Meantime, all their canals are choked with 
human dung, which they are too poor to cart away, but throw out at 
their windows. 

And all the great thirteenth -century cathedrals in France have been 
destroyed, within my own memory, only that architects might charge 
commission for putting up false models of them in their place. 

5 



1Q 



FOKS CLAVIGERA. 



Are there any of you who are tired of all this? Any 
of you, Landlords or Tenants % Employers or Workmen ? 

Are there any landlords,— any masters, — who would like 
better to be served by men than by iron devils % 

Any tenants, any workmen, who can be true to their 
leaders and to each other ? who can vow to work and to 
live faithfully, for the sake of the joy of their homes % 

Will any such give the tenth of what they have, and of 
what they earn, — not to emigrate with, but to stay in Eng- 
land with; and do what is in their hands aud hearts to 
make her a happy England % 

I am not rich ; (as people now estimate riches), and 
great part of what I have is already engaged in maintain- 
ing art- workmen, or for other objects more or less of pub- 
lic utility. The tenth of whatever is left to me, estimated 
as accurately as I can, (you shall see the accounts,) I will 
make over to you in perpetuity, with the best security that 
English law can give, on Christmas Day of this year, with 
engagement to add the tithe of whatever I earn after- 
wards. Who else will help, with little or much % the ob- 
ject of such fund being, to begin, and gradually — no mat- 
ter how slowly — to increase, the buying and securing of 
land in England, which shall not be built upon, but culti- 
vated by Englishmen, with their own hands, and such help 
of force as they can find in wind and wave. 

I do not care with how many, or how few, this thing is 
begun, nor on what inconsiderable scale, — if it be but in 
two or three poor men's gardens. So much, at least, I 



FOKS CLAVIOERA. 99 

can buy, myself, and give them. If no help come, I have 
done and said what I could, and there will be an end. If 
any help come to me, it is to be on the following condi- 
tions : — We will try to make some small piece of English 
ground, beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have 
no steam-engines upon it, and no railroads ; we will have 
no untended or unthought-of creatures on it ; none 
wretched, but the sick; none idle, but the dead. We 
will have no liberty upon it; but instant obedience to 
known law, and appointed persons : no equality upon it ; 
but recognition of every betterness that we can find, and 
reprobation of every worsen ess. When we want to go 
anywhere, we will go there quietly and safely, not at forty 
miles an hour in the risk of our lives ; when we want to 
carry anything anywhere, we will carry it either on the 
backs of beasts, or on our own, or in carts, or boats ; 
we will have plenty of flowers and vegetables in our gar- 
dens, plenty of corn and grass in our fields, — and few 
bricks. We will have some music and poetry ; the 
children shall learn to dance to it and sing it ; — perhaps 
some of the old people, in time, may also. We will have 
some art, moreover; we will at least try if, like the 
Greeks, we can't make some pots. The Greeks used to 
paint pictures of gods on their pots ; we, probably, cannot 
do as much, but we may put some pictures of insects on 
them, and reptiles ; — butterflies, and frogs, if nothing bet- 
ter. There was an excellent old potter in France who 
used to put frogs and vipers into his dishes, to the admi- 



100 FOBS CLAVIGERA. 

ration of mankind; we can surely put something nicer 
than that. Little by little, some higher art and imagina- 
tion may manifest themselves among us ; and feeble rays 
of science may dawn for ns. Botany, though too dull to 
dispute the existence of flowers ; and history, though too 
simple to question the nativity of men ; — nay — even per- 
haps an uncalculating and uncovetous wisdom, as of rude 
Magi, presenting, at such nativity, gifts of gold and 
frankincense. 

Faithfully yours, 

JOHN KITSKIK 




E 2ST VY". 
Drawn thus by Giotto in the Chapel of the A. Padua. 



LETTEE VI. 

Denmark Hill, 
My Friends, 1st June, 1871.* 

The main purpose of these letters having been 
stated in the last of them, it is needful that I should tell 
you why I approach the discussion of it in this so desul- 
tory way, writing (as it is too true that I must continue to 
write,) " of things that you little care for, in words that 
you cannot easily understand." 

I write of things you little care for, knowing that what 
you least care for is, at this juncture, of the greatest mo- 
ment to you. 

And I write in words you are little likely to understand, 
because I have no wish (rather the contrary) to tell you 
anything that you can understand without taking trouble. 
You usually read so fast that you can catch nothing but 

* I think it best to publish this letter as it was prepared for press on 
the morning of the 25th of last month, at Abingdon, before the papers 
of that day had reached me. You may misinterpret its tone ; and think 
it is written without feeling ; but I will endeavour to give you in my 
next letter, a brief statement of the meaning, to the French and to all 
other nations, of this war, arid its results : in the meantime, trust me, 
there is probably no other man living to whom, in the abstract, and ir- 
respective of loss of family and property, the ruin of Paris is so great a 
sorrow as it is to me. 



102 FOES CLAVIGEEA. 

the echo of your own opinions, which, of course, you are 
pleased to see in print. I neither wish to please nor dis- 
please you ; but to provoke you to think ; to lead you to 
think accurately; and help you to form, perhaps, some 
different opinions from those you have now. 

Therefore, I choose that you shall pay me the price of 
two pots of beer, twelve times in the year, for my advice, 
each of you who wants it. If you like to think of me as a 
quack doctor, you are welcome ; and you may consider the 
large margins, and thick paper, and ugly pictures of my 
book, as my caravan, drum, and skeleton. You would 
probably, if invited in that manner, buy my pills ; and I 
should make a great deal of money out of you ; but being 
an honest doctor, I still mean you to pay me what you 
ought. You fancy, doubtless, that I write — as most other 
political writers do — my " opinions ; " and that one man's 
opinion is as good as another's. You are much mistaken. 
When I only opine things, I hold my tongue ; and work 
till I more than opine — until I know them. If the things 
prove unknowable, I with final perseverance, hold my 
tongue about them, and recommend a like practice to other 
people. If the things prove knowable, as soon as I know 
them, I am ready to write about them, if need be ; not 
till then. That is what people call my " arrogance." 
They write and talk themselves, habitually, of what they 
know nothing about; they cannot in any wise conceive 
the state of mind of a person who will not speak till he 
knows ; and then tells them, serenely, " This is so ; you 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 103 

may find it out for yourselves, if you choose ; but, how- 
ever little you may choose it, the thing is still so." 

Xow it has cost me twenty years of thought, and of 
hard reading, to learn what I have to tell you in these 
pamphlets ; and you will find, if you choose to find, it is 
true ; and may prove, if you choose to prove, that it is 
useful : and I am not in the least minded to compete for 
your audience with the " opinions " in your damp journals, 
morning and evening, the black of them coming off on 
your fingers, and beyond all washing, into your brains. It 
is no affair of mine whether you attend to me or not ; but 
yours wholly ; my hand is weary of pen-holding, my heart 
is sick of thinking ; for my own part, I would not write 
you these pamphlets though you would give me a barrel 
of beer, instead of two pints, for them ; — I write them 
wholly for your sake ; I choose that you shall have them 
decently printed on cream-coloured paper, and with a mar- 
gin underneath, which you can write on, if you like. That 
is also for your sake ; it is a proper form of book for any 
man to have who can keep his books clean ; and if he 
cannot, he has no business with books at all ; it costs me 
ten pounds to print a thousand copies, and five more to 
give you a picture ; and a penny off my sevenpence to 
send you the book — a thousand sixpences are twenty-five 
pounds ; when you have bought a thousand Fors of me, I 
shall therefore have five pounds for my trouble — and my 
single shopman, Mr. Allen, five pounds for his ; we won't 
work for less, either of us ; not that we would not, were 



104 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

it good for you ; but it would be by no means good. And 
I mean to sell all my large books, henceforward, in the 
same way; well printed, well bound, and at a fixed price ; 
and the trade may charge a proper and acknowledged 
profit for their trouble in retailing the book. Then the 
public know what they are about, and so will tradesmen ; 
I, the first producer, answer, to the best of my power, for 
the quality of the book ; — paper, binding, eloquence, and 
all: the retail-dealer charges what he ought to charge, 
openly ; and if the public do not choose to give it, they 
can't get the book. That is what I call legitimate busi- 
ness. Then as for this misunderstanding of me — remem- 
ber that it is really not easy to understand anything, which 
you have not heard before, if it relates to a complex sub- 
ject ; also it is quite easy to misunderstand things that you 
are hearing every day — which seem to you of the intelli- 
giblest sort. But I can only write of things in my own 
way and as they come into my head ; and of the things I 
care for, whether you care for them or not, as yet. I will 
answer for it, you must care for some of them, in time. 

To take an instance close to my hand : you would of 
course think it little conducive to your interests that I 
should give you any account of the wild hyacinths which 
are opening in flakes of blue fire, this day, within a couple 
of miles of me, in the glades of Bagley wood through 
which the Empress Maude fled in the snow, (and which, 
by the way, I slink through, myself, in some discomfort, 
lest the gamekeeper of the college of the gracious Apos- 



FOES CLAVIGEEA. 105 

tie St. John should catch sight of rue ; not that he would 
ultimately decline to make a distinction between a poacher 
and a professor, but that I dislike the trouble of giving 
an account of myself.) Or, if even you would bear with 
a scientific sentence or two about them, explaining to you 
that they were only green leaves turned blue, and that it 
was of no consequence whether they were either ; and 
that, as flowers, they were scientifically to be consid- 
ered as not in existence, — you will, I fear, throw my letter, 
even though it has cost you sevenpence, aside at once, 
when I remark to you that these wood-hyacinths of Bagley 
have something to do with the battle of Marathon, and if 
you knew it, are of more vital interest to you than even 
the Match Tax. 

Nevertheless, as I shall feel it my duty, some day, to 
speak to you of Theseus and his vegetable soup, so to-day, 
I think it necessary to tell you that the wood-hyacinth is 
the best English representative of the tribe of flowers 
which the Greeks called "Asphodel," and which they 
thought the heroes who had fallen in the battle of Mara- 
thon, or in any other battle, fought in just quarrel, were 
to be rewarded, and enough rewarded, by living in fields 
full of ; fields called, by them, Elysian, or the Fields of 
Coming, as you and I talk of the good time " Coming," 
though with perhaps different views as to the nature of 
the to be expected goodness. 

Now what the Chancellor of the Exchequer said the 

other day to the Civil Engineers (see Saturday Review, 
5* 



106 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

April 29th), is entirely true ; namely, that in any of our 
colliery or cartridge-manufactory explosions, we send as 
many men (or women) into Elysium as were likely to get 
there after the battle of Marathon ; * and that is, indeed, 
like the rest of our economic arrangements, very fine, and 
pleasant to think upon; neither may it be doubted on 
modern principles of religion and equality, that every col- 
lier and cartridge-filler is as fit for Elysium as any heathen 
could be ; and that in all these respects the battle of Ma- 
rathon is no more deserving of English notice. But what 
I want you to reflect upon, as of moment to you, is 
whether you really care for the hyacinthine Elysium you 
are going to % and if you do, why you should not live a 
little while in Elysium here, instead of waiting so patiently, 
and working so hardly, to be blown or flattened into it % 
The hyacinths will grow well enough on the top of the 
ground, if you will leave off digging away the bottom of 
it ; and another plant of the asphodel species, which the 
Greeks thought of more importance even than hyacinths 
— onions ; though, indeed, one dead hero is represented by 
Lucian as finding something to complain of even in Ely- 
sium, because he got nothing but onions there to eat. But 
it is simply, I assure you, because the French did not un- 
derstand that hyacinths and onions were the principal 



* Of course this was written, and in type, before the late catastro- 
phe in Paris, and the one at Dunkirk is, I suppose, long since forgotten, 
much more our own good beginning at — Birmingham — was it ? I forget, 
myself, now. 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 107 

things to fill their existing Elysian Fields, or Champs 
Elysees, with, but chose to have carriages, and roundabouts 
instead, that a tax on matches in those fields would be, 
now-a-days, so much more productive than one on Aspho- 
del ; and I see that only a day or two since even a poor 
Punch's show could not play out its play in Elysian peace, 
but had its corner knocked off by a shell from Mont Va- 
lerien, and the dog Toby "seriously alarmed." 

One more instance of the things you don't care for, 
that are vital to you, may be better told now than here- 
after. 

In my plan for our practical work, in last number, you 
remember I said, we must try and make some pottery, and 
have some music, and that we would have no steam- 
engines. On this I received a singular letter from a resi- 
dent at Birmingham, advising me that the colours for my 
pottery must be ground by steam, and my musical instru- 
ments constructed by it. To this, as my correspondent 
was an educated person, and knew Latin, I ventured to 
answer that porcelain had been painted before the time of 
James Watt ; that even music was not entirely a recent 
invention ; that my poor company, I feared, would deserve 
no better colours than Apelles and Titian made shift with, 
or even the Chinese ; and that I could not find any notice 
of musical instruments in the time of David, for instance, 
having been made by steam. 

To this my correspondent again replied that he supposed 
David's " twangling upon the harp " would have been un- 



108 FORS CLAVIGEKA. 

satisfactory to modern taste ; in which sentiment I concur- 
red with him, (thinking of the Cumberland procession, 
without dancing, after its sacred, cylindrical Ark). "We 
shall have to be content, however, for our part, with a little 
" twangling " on such roughly-made harps, or even shells, 
as the Jews and Greeks got their melody out of, though it 
must indeed be little conceivable in a modern manufac- 
turing town that a nation could ever have existed which 
imaginarily dined on onions in Heaven, and made harps 
of the near relations of turtles on Earth. But, to keep to 
our crockery, you know I told you that for some time we 
should not be able to put any pictures of Gods on it ; and 
you might think that would be of small consequence : but 
it is of moment that we should at least try — for indeed 
that old French potter, Palissy, was nearly the last of pot- 
ters in France, or England either, who could have done so, 
if anybody had wanted Gods. But nobody in his time 
did ; — they only wanted Goddesses, of a demi-divine- 
monde pattern ; Palissy, not well able to produce such, took 
to moulding innocent frogs and vipers instead, in his dishes ; 
but at Sevres and other places for shaping of courtly 
clay, the charmingest things were done, as you probably 
saw at the great peace-promoting Exhibition of 1851 ; and 
not only the first rough potter's fields, tileries, as they called 
them, or Tuileries, but the little den where Palissy long 
after worked under the Louvre, were effaced and forgotten 
in the glory of the house of France ; until the House of 
France forgot also that to it, no less than the House of Is- 



FOES CLAVTGERA. 109 

rael, the words were spoken, not by a painted Grod, " As 
the clay is in the hands of the potter, so are ye in mine ; " 
and thns the stained and vitrified show of it lasted, as you 
have seen, until the Tuileries again become the Potter's 
field, to bury, not strangers in, but their own souls, no more 
ashamed of Traitorhood, but invoking Traitorhood, as if it 
covered, instead of constituting, uttermost shame ; — until, 
of the kingdom and its glory there is not a shard left, to 
take fire out of the hearth. 

Left — to men's eyes, I should have written. To their 
thoughts, is left yet much ; for true kingdoms and true 
glories cannot pass away. What France has had of such 
remain to her. What any of us can find of such, will 
remain to us. Will you look back, for an instant, again to 
the end of my last Letter, p. 99, and consider the state of 
life described there :— " No liberty, but instant obedience 
to known law and appointed persons ; no equality, but 
recognition of every betterness and reprobation of every 
worseness ; and none idle but the dead." 

I beg you to observe that last condition especially. You 
will debate for many a day to come the causes that have 
brought this misery upon France, and there are many ; but 
one is chief — chief cause, now and always, of evil every- 
where ; and I see it at this moment, in its deadliest form, 
out of the window of my quiet English inn. It is the 21st 
of May, and a bright morning, and the sun shines, for 
once, warmly on the wall opposite, a low one, of ornamental 
pattern, imitative in brick of wood-work (as if it had been 



110 FOES CLAVIGEEA. 

of wood-work, it would, doubtless, have been painted to 
look like brick). Against this low decorative edifice leans 
a ruddy-faced English boy of seventeen or eighteen, in a 
white blouse and brown corduroy trousers, and a domical 
felt hat ; with the sun, as much as can get under the rim, 
on his face, and his hands in his pockets ; listlessly watching 
two dogs at play. He is a good boy, evidently, and does 
not care to turn the play into a fight ; * still it is not in- 
teresting enough to him, as play, to relieve the extreme 
distress of his idleness, and he occasionally takes his hands 
out of his pockets, and claps them at the dogs to startle 
them. 

The ornamental wall he leans against surrounds the 
county police-office, and the residence at the end of it, 
appropriately called " Gaol Lodge." This county gaol, 
police-office, and a large gasometer, have been built by the 
good people of Abingdon to adorn the principal entrance 
to their town from the south. It was once quite one of the 
loveliest, as well as historically interesting, scenes in Eng- 
land. A few cottages and their gardens, sloping down 
to the river-side, are still left, and an arch or two of the 
great monastery ; but the principal object from the road 
is now the gaol, and from the river the gasometer. It is 
curious that since the English have believed (as you will 
find the editor of the Liverpool Daily Post, quoting to 
you from Macaulay, in his leader of the 9th of this month), 

* This was at seven in the morning, he had them fighting at half -past 
nine. 



FORS CLAVIGERA. Ill 

" the only cure for Liberty is more liberty " (which is true 
enough, for when you have got all you can, you will be 
past physic), they always make their gaols conspicuous 
and ornamental. Now I have no objection, myself, detest- 
ing, as I do, every approach to liberty, to a distinct mani- 
festation of gaol, in proper quarters ; nay, in the highest, 
and in the close neighbourhood of palaces ; perhaps, even, 
with a convenient passage, and Ponte de' Sospiri, from one 
to the other, or, at least, a pleasant access by water-gate 
and down the river ; but I do not see why in these days 
of " incurable" liberty, the prospect in approaching a quiet 
English county town should be gaol, and nothing else. 

That being so, however, the country-boy, in his white 
blouse, leans placidly against the prison-wall this bright 
Sunday morning, little thinking what a luminous sign-post 
he is making of himself, and living gnomon of sun-dial, 
of which the shadow points sharply to the subtlest cause 
of the fall of France, and of England, as is too likely, 
after her. 

Your hands in your own pockets, in the morning. 
That is the beginning of the last day ; your hands in 
other people's pockets at noon ; that is the height of the 
last day ; and the gaol, ornamented or otherwise (assuredly 
the great gaol of the grave), for the night. That is the 
history of nations under judgment. Don't think I say 
this to any single class ; least of all specially to you ; the 
rich are continually, now-a-days, reproaching you with 
your wish to be idle. It is very wrong of you ; but, do 



112 FOES CLAVIGERA. 

they want to work all day, themselves % All mouths are 
very properly open now against the Paris Communists 
because they fight that they may get wages for marching 
about with nags. What do the upper classes fight for, 
then ? What have they fought for since the world became 
upper and lower, but that they also might have wages 
for walkiug about with flags, and that mischievously ? 
It is very wrong of the Communists to steal church-plate 
and candlesticks. Yery wrong indeed ; and much good 
may they get of their pawnbrokers' tickets. Have you 
any notion (I mean that you shall have some soon), how 
much the fathers and fathers' fathers of these men, for 
a thousand years back, have paid their priests, to keep 
them in plate and candlesticks ? You need not think I 
am a republican, or that I like to see priests ill-treated, 
and their candlesticks carried off. I have many friends 
among priests, and should have had more had I not long 
been trying to make them see that they have long trusted 
too much in candle-sticks, not quite enough in caudles; 
not at all enough in the sun, and least of all enough in the 
sun's Maker. Scientific people indeed of late opine the 
sun to have been produced by collision, and to be a splen- 
didly permanent railroad accident, or explosive Elysium : 
also I noticed, only yesterday, that gravitation itself is 
announced to the members of the Royal Institution as the 
result of vibratory motion. Some day, perhaps, the mem- 
bers of the Royal Institution will proceed to inquire after 
the cause of — vibratory motion. Be that as it may, the 



FOKS CLAVIGERA. 113 

Beginning, or Prince of "Vibration, as modern science has 
it, — Prince of Peace, as old science had it, — continues 
through all scientific analysis, His own arrangements 
about the sun, as also about other lights, lately hidden, or 
burning low. And these are primarily, that He has ap- 
pointed a great power to rise and set in heaven, which 
gives life, and warmth, and motion, to the bodies of men, 
and beasts, creeping things, and flowers ; and which also 
causes light and colour in the eyes of things that have 
eyes. And he has set above the souls of men, on earth, a 
great law or Sun of Justice or Righteousness, which brings 
also life and health in the daily strength and spreading of 
it, being spoken of in the priests' language, (which they 
never explained to anybody, and now wonder that nobody 
understands,) as having " healing in its wings : " and the 
obedience to this law, as it gives strength to the heart, so 
it gives light to the eyes of souls that have got any eyes, 
so that they begin to see each other as lovely, and to love 
each other. That is the final law respecting the sun, and 
all manner of minor lights and candles, down to rush- 
lights ; and I once got it fairly explained, two years ago, 
to an intelligent and obliging wax-and-tallow chandler at 
Abbeville, in whose shop I used to sit sketching in rainy 
days ; and watching the cartloads of ornamental candles 
which he used to supply for the church at the far east end 
of the town, (I forget what saint it belongs to, but it is 
opposite the late Emperor's large new cavalry barracks), 
where the young ladies of the better class in Abbeville 



114 FORS CLAVIGERA. 

had just got up a beautiful evening service, with a pyra- 
mid of candles which it took at least half-an-hour to light, 
and as long to put out again, and which, when lighted up 
to the top of the church, were only to be looked at them- 
selves, and sung to, and not to light anybody, or anything. 
I got the tallow-chander to calculate vaguely the probable 
cost of the candles lighted in this manner, every day, in 
all the churches of France ; and then I asked him how 
many cottagers' wives he knew round Abbeville itself who 
could afford, without pinching, either dip or mould in the 
evening to make their children's clothes by, and whether, 
if the pink and green bees- wax of the district were divided 
every afternoon among them, it might not be quite as 
honourable to God, and as good for the candle-trade ? 
Which he admitted readily enough ; but what I should 
have tried to convince the young ladies themselves of, at 
the evening service, would probably not have been admit- 
ted so readily ; — that they themselves were nothing more 
than an extremely graceful kind of wax-tapers which had 
got into their heads that they were only to be looked at, 
for the honour of God, and not to light anybody. 

Which is indeed too much the notion of even the 
masculine aristocracy of Europe at this day. One can 
imagine them, indeed, modest in the matter of their own 
luminousness, and more timid of the tax on agricultural 
horses and carts, than of that on lucifers ; but it would be 
well if they were content, here in England, however dimly 
phosphorescent themselves, to bask in the sunshine of 



FOES CLAVIGERA. 115 

May at the end of Westminster Bridge, (as my boy on 
Abingdon Bridge), with their backs against the large edi- 
fice they have bnilt there, an edifice, by the way, to my 
own poor judgment less contributing to the adornment of 
London, than the new police-office to that of Abingdon. 
But the English squire, after his fashion, sends himself to 
that highly decorated gaol all spring-time ; and cannot be 
content with his hands in his own pockets, nor even in 
yours and mine ; but claps and laughs, semi-idiot that he 
is, at dog-fights on the floor of the House, which, if he 
knew it, are indeed dog-fights of the Stars in their courses, 
Sirius against Proeyon ; and of the havock and loosed 
dogs of war, makes, as The Times' correspondent says 
they make, at Versailles, of the siege of Paris, " the En- 
tertainment of the Hour." 

You think that, perhaps, an unjust saying of him, as he 
will, assuredly himself. He would fain put an end to this 
wild work, if he could, he thinks. 

My friends, I tell you solemnly, the sin of it all, down to 
this last night's doing, or undoing, (for it is Monday now, 
1 waited before finishing my letter, to see if the Sainte 
Chapelle would follow the Vendome Column ;) the sin of 
it, I tell you, is not that poor rabble's ; spade and pickaxe 
in hand among the dead ; nor yet the blasphemer's, making 
noise like a dog by the defiled altars of onr Lady of Vic- 
tories ; and round the barricades, and the ruins, of the 
Street of Peace. 

This cruelty has been done by the kindest of us, and 



116 FORS CLAVIGERA. 

the most honourable ; by the delicate women, by the no- 
bly-nurtured men, who through their happy and, as they 
thought, holy lives, have sought, and still seek, only " the 
entertainment of the hour." And this robbery has been 
taught to the hands, — this blasphemy to the lips, — of the 
lost poor, by the False Prophets who have taken the name 
of Christ in vain, and leagued themselves with his chief 
enemy, " Covetousness, which is idolatry." 

Covetousness, lady of Competition and of deadly 
Care ; idol above the altars of Ignoble Yictory ; builder 
of streets, in cities of Ignoble Peace. I have given you 
the picture of her — your goddess and only Hope — as 
Giotto saw her ; dominant in prosperous Italy as in pros- 
perous England, and having her hands clawed then, as 
now, so that she can only clutch, not work ; also you shall 
read next month with me what one of Giotto's friends 
says of her — a rude versifier, one of the twangling harp- 
ers ; as Giotto was a poor painter for low price, and with 
colours ground by hand ; but such cheap work must serve 
our turn for this time ; also, here, is pourtrayed for you * 
one of the ministering angels of the goddess ; for she her- 
self, having ears set wide to the wind, is careful to have 



* Engraved, as also the woodcut in the April number, carefully after 
Holbein, by my coal-waggon-assisting assistant : but he has missed his 
mark somewhat, here ; the imp's abortive hands, hooked processes only, 
like Envy's, and pterodactylous, are scarcely seen in their clutch of the 
bellows, and there are other faults. We will do it better for you, after- 
wards. 



FOES CLAVIOEKA. 



117 



wind-instruments provided by her servants for other peo- 
ple's ears. 




This servant of hers was drawn by the court portrait 
painter, Holbein ; and was a councillor at poor-law boards, 
in his day ; counselling then, as some of us have, since, 
" Bread of Affliction and Water of Affliction " for the 
vagrant as such, — which is, indeed, good advice, if you 
are quite sure the vagrant has, or may have a home ; not 
otherwise. But we will talk further of this next month, 
taking into council one of Holbein's prosaic friends, as 
well as that singing friend of Giotto's — an English lawyer 
and country gentleman, living on his farm at Chelsea — 
(somewhere near Cheyne Row, I believe) — and not unfre- 
quently visited there by the King of England, who would 
ask himself unexpectedly to dinner at the little Thames- 
side farm, though the floor of it was only strewn with 
green rushes. It was burnt at last, rushes, ricks, and all ; 
some said because bread of affliction and water of afflic- 



118 FORS CLAVIGERA. 

tion had been served to heretics there, its master being a 
stout Catholic ; and, singularly enough, also a Communist ; 
so that because of the fire, and other matters, the King at 
last ceased to dine at Chelsea. We will have some talk, 
however, with the farmer, ourselves, some day soon ; 
meantime and always, believe me, 

Faithfully yours, 

JOHN KUSKIK 



FOES CLAVTGERA. 119 



POSTSCRIPT. 



25th May (early morning), Renter's final telegram, in 
the Echo of last night, being " The Louvre and the Tui- 
leries are in flames, the Federals having set fire to them 
with petroleum," it is interesting to observe how in fulfil- 
ment of the Mechanical Glories of our age, its ingenious 
Gomorrah manufactures, and supplies, to demand, her own 
brimstone ; achieving also a quite scientific, instead of 
miraculous, descent of it from Heaven ; and ascent of it, 
where required, without any need of cleaving or quaking 
of earth, except in a superficially " vibratory " manner. 

Nor can it be less encouraging to you to see how, with 
a sufficiently curative quantity of Liberty, you may defend 
yourselves against all danger of over-Production, especially 
in art; but, in case you should ever wish to re-" produce" 
any of the combustibles (as oil, or canvas), used in these 
Parisian Economies, you will do well to inquire of the au- 
thor of the " Essay on Liberty," whether he considers oil 
of linseed, or petroleum, as best fulfilling his definition, 
" utilities fixed and embodied in material objects." 



LIBRARY OF 




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